PHILADELPHIA, PA.- 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, 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.


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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.”

“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.

Cecily Brown (b. 1969, London; lives and works in New York) is one of the most celebrated artists working in painting today. She first moved to New York in the mid-1990s, following her graduation from the renowned Slade School of Fine Art in London. Since storming the boys’ club of painting that had dominated the New York scene for decades, Brown has defied expectations of what art can be. Her radical artistic approach—which occupies the space between figuration and abstraction—affords near-endless possibilities for interpretation and reinterpretation, with layered brushwork that excavates and overlays cultural references and art historical motifs.

Recent one-person exhibitions include Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2023); Cecily Brown, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2022); The Triumph of Death, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); Cecily Brown, at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, England (2020–21); 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 the public collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Norway, Oslo; the Tate Gallery, London; and Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland, among others.


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