HUMLEBÆK.- Cecily Brown has long been on the Louisiana’s wish list. The current exhibition has been the first step. The question was whether the museum could take the next one: to incorporate a work by the artist in its collection. It has succeeded – and quite sensationally – in doing so. Cecily Brown has decided that her more than ten-metre-long painting Where, When, How Often and with Whom – which gave its name to the exhibition – can remain hanging in the museum in Humlebæk after the exhibition is closing in March.

“This is a uniquely generous gesture,” says Louisiana’s Director Poul Erik Tøjner of the gift. “Not only has Cecily Brown taken the public and reviewers here by storm; internationally too the exhibition has aroused attention. And of course we are as happy as can be that to all this we can add such an event as the donation truly is.”

Cecily Brown’s Where, When, How Often and with Whom was painted in 2017, and like her work in general it is full of references to the great masters of art history. But it is also directly inspired by the so-called Burkini affair in the summer of 2016 when French police accosted a veiled woman on the beach in Nice.

“I was angry at the thought that women are being told what they can wear and not wear in the 21st century,” says Cecily Brown, who makes no bones about the fact that conflict is a primary source of her art. Of the specific work she also says: “From the start the painting has had a connection with my experience of the Louisiana, of the place, the sky around it and the sea; and in spite of everything else it’s a work with a shipwreck in it. And then at the same time,” she says, “I simply want to express my gratitude for the great cooperation I’ve had with the museum around the exhibition.”

“A donation of this size from a so-called ‘mid-career’ artist in Cecily Brown’s league is something quite unusual,” notes Poul Erik Tøjner. “And a pleasure at the start of a year when women dominate the museum’s ‘programming’ – from Cecily Brown and Dea Trier Mørch right now through Pipilotti Rist and the Austrian avant-garde artist Birgit Jürgenssen to the American documentarist Lauren Greenfield and the Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao later in the year.”