Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Cecily Brown in the gallery’s primary exhibition space at 534 West 21st Street. This is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in New York since the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective Death and The Maid (2023) and reflects upon the contents of that exhibition––which surveyed Brown’s work from the 1990s to the present––with a return to earlier themes.

Transcending classical notions of genre and narrative, Brown consistently draws from a wide range of motifs. The artist’s newest body of work is informed by the remarkable collaborative series of allegorical paintings, The Five Senses (1617-18) by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Now in the collection of the Prado Museum, Madrid, each painting depicts figures surrounded by bountiful sensual stimuli intended to inspire sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch in turn.

The exhibition presents Brown’s mediations on the Five Senses through paintings, drawings and prints. Here, the full range of Brown’s theme is displayed across media, with monotypes and etchings installed alongside works on paper with ink, watercolor, and gouache. Also included in the exhibition are new paintings in which Brown implements UV printing, a technique which first appeared in the artist's work in 2013. Images of earlier paintings (some even unfinished) are printed onto canvas and then painted over, obscuring and continuing the original work and allowing the artist to explore endless new directions. 

Concurrent to the Paula Cooper Gallery exhibition is Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations at the Dallas Museum of Art (September 29, 2024 – February 9, 2025). This is the largest exhibition of Brown’s work in the United States to date, and the first to foreground her reconfigurations of art history and contemporary culture. This show will travel to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (March 9 – May 25, 2025).

Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London) is one of the most celebrated artists working in painting today. Using a palette ranging from bright hues to deep blacks, her works obscure singular readings as their compositions break down into restless, anfractuous, and elusive activity. Recent notable one-person exhibitions include Cecily Brown: Temptations, Torments, Trials and Tribulations, Museo Novecento, Florence (2023); Cecily Brown: Death and The Maid, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2023); Cecily Brown, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); The Triumph of Death, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); Cecily Brown, at Blenheim Palace, UK (2020–2021); Where, When, How Often and with Whom at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2018); If Paradise Were Half as Nice, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2018); and Rehearsal, at The Drawing Center, New York (2016). Her work is included in public collections such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery, Washington D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Norway, Oslo; the Tate Gallery, London; and Glenstone Museum, Potomac.