Independent Arts News Reporting The Barnes Foundation Presents Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations
Reported: Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
Pictured Above: Cecily Brown. High Society, 1998. Oil on linen, 76 × 98 in. (193 × 248.9 cm). Martin and Toni Sosnoff. Photo Credit: Contributed.
East Coast premiere of major Cecily Brown mid-career retrospective will be on view at the Barnes Foundation from March 9–May 25, 2025
NEWSROOM POST: PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia, PA – In spring 2025, the Barnes Foundation will present the East Coast premiere of Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations, a major mid-career retrospective of pioneering British painter Cecily Brown. Co-organized by the Barnes and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), this exhibition is the largest presentation of Brown’s work in the US to date and her first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. Co-curated by Simonetta Fraquelli, independent art historian and consultant curator for the Barnes, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, the exhibition spans three decades of Brown’s career, showcasing her subversive reconfiguration of art history and contemporary culture.
On view in the Roberts Gallery from March 9 through May 25, 2025, Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal. Additional support is provided by the Forman Family Foundation, Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, Carlo Bronzini Vender, Anonymous, and other generous individuals.
Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is the first exhibition to fully explore Cecily Brown’s work through the lens of its groundbreaking reconfiguration of cultural politics. Bringing together more than 30 large-scale paintings and works on paper that highlight Brown’s subversion of gendered tropes in art history and popular culture, the exhibition sheds light on her practice and considers her work from a feminist perspective. The exhibition reveals how she reclaimed the heroic gestural expression associated with an earlier generation of male artists—a style largely out of favor with her peers—to create lush, dynamic, and often erotic paintings. Moving between figuration and abstraction, her work explores the power imbalances inherent in voyeurism and sexual violence.
“In her work, Cecily Brown subverts scenes from centuries-old European paintings and complicates the gendered stereotypes of traditional genres, like those found in the Barnes collection,” says Thom Collins, Neubauer Family Executive Director and President. “We are proud to present the East Coast premiere of this major mid-career retrospective of Cecily Brown, a leading figure in the field of contemporary painting and one of the most celebrated artists working in painting today. This exhibition is aligned with our commitment to presenting the work of remarkable women artists,including groundbreaking contemporary artists like Mickalene Thomas, Lebohang Kganye, and Sue Williamson, and significant but underrecognized women working in the European modernist vanguard of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—like Marie Laurencin, Suzanne Valadon, and Berthe Morisot.”
Pictured Above: Cecily Brown, Madrepora (Alluvial), 2017. Gouache, watercolor, and pastel on paper. 40 × 60 in. (101.6 × 152.4 cm). Private collection. Photo Credit: Contributed.
“Cecily Brown’s art is filled with a sense of vibrancy, vitality, and endless possibilities,” says Fraquelli. “She invites the viewer to explore each work closely, examine every aspect of its surface, and hunt out the imagery, while at the same time to be immersed in its luxurious colors and forms. Brown’s work compels a mode of slow looking—a method inherent in the Barnes’s educational program—in which multiple or entire scenes gradually emerge from her rich and abundant layers of paint. Rather than simply making painting contemporary, she makes it contemporaneous, for we are compelled to participate in the cacophonous actions she portrays.”
“In examining the recurring tropes in Cecily Brown’s paintings, viewers are able to appreciate the artist’s adept ability to reclaim and redefine female subjects,” says Brodbeck. “In her work, Brown continues to challenge artistic conventions and engage audiences with her revisionist approach to the history of art.”
Featuring paintings and works on paper from prominent institutional and private collections, Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is organized around scenes and motifs prevalent throughout visual culture, including the boudoir, the garden, the hunt, and the shipwreck. Brown’s references range from centuries-old European paintings to contemporary pop songs. She subverts her sources’ messages of male domination over women and the natural world, complicating the gendered stereotypes of traditional genres. Brown continually reexamines art history with contemporary issues in mind while revisiting her own works to generate new compositions.
Exhibition highlights include:
-Girl on a Swing (2004), which complicates the voyeurism on display in rococo-style painting.
-Saboteur Four Times (2019), a large-scale work composed of four canvases, representing Brown’s recent use of digital imagery and reflecting her multifaceted process.
-The Splendid Table (2019–20), a monumental triptych that takes inspiration, in part, from 17th-century Flemish still-life painting.
-Untitled (2023), two new large-scale oil monotypes with hand additions in pastel, exhibited for the first time as part of this exhibition.
Pictured Above: Cecily Brown, Black shipwreck, 2018. Oil on linen, 83 × 79 in. (210.8 × 200.7 cm). Collection of Nancy and Pat Forster. Photo Credit: Contributed.
ABOUT THE CO-CURATORS
Simonetta Fraquelli, an independent curator specializing in early 20th-century European art, is a consultant curator for the Barnes. Fraquelli began her career at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where she worked for over 20 years on a range of exhibitions. Since 2006, she has collaborated with several leading European and American museums. In 2016, she curated Picasso: The Great War, Experimentation and Change at the Barnes. In 2017, she co-curated one of the largest exhibitions of Modigliani’s work, Modigliani at Tate, London. She was co-curator of Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint at the Barnes in 2021 and Modigliani Up Close in 2022. She has published on many artists, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Gino Severini. She holds advanced degrees from the Courtauld Institute, London.
Anna Katherine Brodbeck is Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Since joining the DMA in 2017, Brodbeck has curated numerous exhibitions, including He Said / She Said: Contemporary Women Interject; When You See Me: Visibility in Contemporary Art / History; Movement: The Legacy of Kineticism; For a Dreamer of Houses; Jonas Wood; and America Will Be!: Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, as well as the museum’s emerging artist platform series, Concentrations, and its annual mural commission. Prior to joining the DMA, she worked in the curatorial departments at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Frick Collection, New York. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary art.
CATALOGUE
Accompanying the exhibition is a stunning volume that surveys the pioneering career of Cecily Brown (b. 1969), one of the most celebrated artists working in painting today. Edited by co-curators Anna Katherine Brodbeck and Simonetta Fraquelli, with contributions from writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza, the book explores Brown’s process through paintings and drawings that demonstrate both her radical contemporaneity and her keen reassessment of historical precedents such as old master paintings and abstract expressionism, which have been consistent hallmarks of her art. The book’s probing essays look at her practice, investigate the main themes that recur in her work, and consider her art from a feminist perspective.
Pictured Above: The Barnes Foundation, Detail Room 19, North Wall. Photo Credit: Image © The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo by Sean Murray.
ABOUT THE BARNES FOUNDATION
The Barnes Foundation is a nonprofit cultural and educational institution that shares its unparalleled art collection with the public, organizes special exhibitions, and presents programming that fosters new ways of thinking about human creativity. The Barnes collection is displayed in ensembles that integrate art and objects from across cultures and time periods, overturning traditional hierarchies and revealing universal elements of human expression. Home to one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings—including the largest groups of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne in existence—the Barnes brings together renowned canvases by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, and Vincent van Gogh, alongside African, Asian, ancient, medieval, and Native American art as well as metalwork, furniture, and decorative art.
The Barnes was established by Dr. Albert C. Barnes in 1922 to “promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.” A visionary collector and pioneering educator, Dr. Barnes was also a fierce advocate for the civil rights of African Americans, women, and the economically marginalized. Committed to racial equality and social justice, he established a scholarship program to support young Black artists, writers, and musicians who wanted to further their education. Dr. Barnes became actively involved in the Harlem Renaissance, during which he collaborated with philosopher Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson, the scholar and activist, to promote awareness of the artistic value of African art.
Since moving to Philadelphia in 2012, the Barnes has expanded its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and social justice, teaching visual literacy in groundbreaking ways; investing in original scholarship relating to its collection; and enhancing accessibility throughout every facet of its programs.
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