"Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations" on view at Barnes Foundation through May 25

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The Barnes Foundation partnered with the Dallas Museum of Art to present "Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations."

"It brings together some 30 works of Cecily Brown's career," says Simonetta Fraquelli, co-curator of the exhibition. "From her works in the late '90s to recent works, the most recent being 2023."

"Saboteur four times" is a painting of Brown's from 2019, which is currently on view in the first room of the exhibition.

Brown says viewing her paintings should be a slow experience, because her work can look "abstract at first glance" since it's very colorful, but "all sorts of content emerges the more you look at it."

"In her work you do see this repetition. She's not only looking, referencing her own work, but also the art of the past," says Fraquelli.

The exhibition is arranged in five thematic sections.

"You'll get some classic tropes, or like still lives or figures, or landscapes," says Fraquelli. "She also painted a series of shipwrecks."

Early in her career, she painted bunnies as stand-ins for humans, then started painting flesh.

"She manages to create these incredibly lush and incredibly sensual, really, surfaces with the paint," says Fraquelli. "And they draw you in."

In the early 2000s, she started to focus on single figures.

"I wanted to really cleanse the palate, literally, and I decided to try and make some paintings just using black and white," says Brown.

Landscapes like "Girl on a Swing" illustrate the contradictions in Brown's work.

"There's a kind of playfulness there, but there's also an undercurrent of something quite sinister happening," says Fraquelli. "The theme of climate change."

"Painting is the perfect vehicle to deal with everything that the world throws at us," says Brown.

Fraquelli says there is often "a contemporary reference" in Brown's work, something that has touched "not just her life, but all our lives."

The final room of the exhibition houses a large triptych called "The Splendid Table".

Brown says there are both "many layers of meaning" and physical layers of paint in the work.

"I'm not trying to make something that looks like anything you've seen before," says Brown. "You do a painting because you can't put it into words."

"Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations" is on view through May 25 at the Barnes Foundation.

For more information:

"Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations" Exhibit / https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/exhibitions/cecily-brown
Link to Tickets at the Barnes Foundation / https://members.barnesfoundation.org

Barnes Foundation
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