“Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid” at The Met Fifth Avenue
For over twenty-five years, Cecily Brown (b. 1969) has transfixed viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives relating to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes.
After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she revived painting for a new generation alongside a handful of other artists—many of them also women—when critics were questioning its import and relevance.
The first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades.
The exhibition is made possible by The Modern Circle and Agnes Gund.
Additional support is provided by Neuberger Berman Private Wealth, the Jeffrey and Leslie Fischer Family Foundation, and Barbara and John Vogelstein.
The catalog is made possible by The Modern Circle.
Additional support is provided by the Forman Family Foundation, Liza Mauer and Andrew Sheiner, Paula Cooper Gallery, and Thomas Dane Gallery.
The exhibition presents the first full-breadth museum survey of the internationally acclaimed artist Cecily Brown (born in 1969) in New York.
Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid highlight the significant contributions of this important New York–based painter over the course of 25 years of her career in the city she has called home for three decades.
The show unites some 50 paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes—many never before seen in New York and several recently completed—to focus on Brown’s enduring and intertwining themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas, symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity.
The exhibition will be on view from April 4 to December 3, 2023.
For more information, please visit metmuseum.org
