Born in London in 1969, Cecily Brown attended the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and was as an exchange student at the New York Studio School before receiving a BFA in painting in 1993. A year later she relocated to New York, distancing herself from a London art scene dominated by the new media-oriented Young British Artists. Influenced by Analytic Cubism and Abstract Expressionism as well as academic painting, Brown explores the material and sensual possibilities of oil paint. In exploring issues of sexuality in painting from a feminine perspective, her work often amplifies the eroticism frequently noted in modernist painting, especially Abstract Expressionism, and satirizes the notions of virility often attributed to such work. Early in her career, Brown experimented with other media, most notably animation. Soon after her return to New York, she created the short mixed-media animated film Four Letter Heaven, which premiered at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival. With its humor, sexual imagery, and energetic brushwork, the film introduced themes that would prove prominent in Brown’s later work. The artist soon returned to painting with a series of orgiastic, exuberantly expressionistic images of bunnies. Cartoonish figures and a colorful palette add an element of black comedy to the bacchanalian subject matter, whose imagery recalls both old-master painting and contemporary pornography. In the late 1990s, Brown shifted focus to the human figure and delved deeper into abstraction. In her work from this period, such as On the Town (1998) and The Pyjama Game (1998), bodies and body parts emerge from frenzied brushwork and dissolve into one another. The paintings’ overall eroticism is emphasized by the heavily layered, virtuosic application of paint that draws attention to its sensuous materiality and the pleasure that can be had from looking at art—and at bodies. Placing the viewer at a slight remove from the reality of the paint, their slick, varnished surfaces both highlight the works’ artifice and underscore the voyeurism inherent in viewing. The densely layered brushwork and fragmented imagery overstimulate while signaling Brown’s interest in spectacle. The titles, which are drawn from Hollywood musicals, evoke the pop-cultural predilection for opulent visuals. Brown’s more recent work continues to explore sensuality and spectacle but in a more sublimated and abstract way. Paintings such as Tender is the Night (1999) or Skulldiver IV (2006–07), with only hints of limbs and faces emerging from the tangle of brushstrokes, examine the tension between abstraction and figuration while others, such as The Green, Green Grass of Home (2010), approach complete abstraction. Brown’s work has been featured in solo shows at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2002–03); Museo nacional centro de arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2005); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006–07); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2009); GEM, The Hague, Netherlands (2010–11); Essl Museum, Vienna (2012). Her work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues including and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2000); Museum für moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2001); Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (2006); and PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Ukraine (2011). Her work also appeared in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Cecily Brown lives and works in New York.