Cecily Brown: ‘Painting happens very quickly; often I don’t know if it’s working’

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 21st March 2026

After art school, Brown left London for New York where she hoped she would fit in. Two decades later she is back for her first major solo show. Her “landscapes-as-abstractions” are both commercially appealing and critically acclaimed. Gestural amalgams of “flesh and pastoral” don’t carry a message other than her appreciation of painting. For some critics her work can be “inert” but not this writer. Brown wants to show “convulsive beauty [and] has magnificently achieved it … a triumphant homecoming”.