With a deep understanding of artwork historical past, and a powerful sense of the present second, the British-born painter Cecily Brown was completely poised to benefit from 2022.

In February, the Museo e Actual Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, inaugurated its 10-month exhibition, exhibiting Brown’s monumental 2019 canvas, The Triumph of Loss of life, in addition to a collection of preparatory sketches. The artist painted this work after visiting the famend mid-fifteenth-century fresco The Triumph of Loss of life situated within the Galleria Regionale within the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo and was excited to see her work within the nation the place she discovered inspiration. 

“It’s a nice honor for me to exhibit considered one of my works on the Museo e Actual Bosco di Capodimonte, which boasts such a rare assortment,” Brown mentioned. “Naples is my favourite metropolis in my favourite nation, and it’s at all times a thrill to point out my work right here.”

The exhibition curator, Sergio Risaliti, returned the praise, saying, “Cecily Brown is an artist who is aware of how one can reinvent the connection between up to date artwork and the nice figurative custom with out indulging in sterile quotations of the previous.”
This sense of reinvention was additionally on show in Munich in June, when Brown’s present Dream Areas opened on the Pinakothek der Moderne. For this present, the artist responded to works within the metropolis’s collections by a various vary of painters, together with Franz Marc, Briegel, Cézanne and Michelangelo, to nice impact.

Works from this summer time present traveled to Berlin in September – specifically her interpretations of Marc’s 1907 interpretation of the Leda and the Swan fable – to kind a part of The Spell, Brown’s solo present on the Up to date Effective Arts gallery within the German Capital.

CECILY BROWN – All of the nightmares got here at the moment, 2012/2019

Although Brown’s historic influences have been on show, this later exhibition focussed on her penchant for nudes and nonetheless lifes. Specifically, the present featured a lot of group nude photos – a topic that the essayist Catherine Foulkrod explores within the present’s notes.

“It was the group that allowed her to color the face,” as Foulkrod factors out. “Compared to portray the face of a single determine, portray faces inside the group, the harem, the gang, ‘was releasing differently.’ It allowed the faces to be each singular and collective, to be factors however not focal factors. To be yours and mine and his and hers and theirs and ours all of sudden.” 

Figures of a really totally different type made Brown’s yr within the public sale homes. At Sotheby’s, 4 works breached the $1m mark throughout 2022, peaking in November with the sale of her 2001 portray, Eyes Huge Shut, which went for $4,527,00. Demand was equally robust at Christies, with the sale of her 1998 work, The Woman Who Had All the pieces, which breached the $5m mark, when it was auctioned in March in London.

None of this phased the artist herself. Brown rounded off the yr by drawing her focus in, with a collection of smaller works introduced collectively for the present Studio Footage, which opened in October at Thomas Dane gallery in London.

Within the exhibition’s notes, the artist is quoted as saying that making these smaller works “is a quieter course of, positively. And, it is a cliché, however it’s a lot tougher to make a small portray than an enormous one.” It could really feel onerous to Brown, however from gallery goers’ views, all of it appears fairly easy. 

Should you missed out on any of Brown’s exhibits, you possibly can, for now, nonetheless choose up considered one of works by way of Artspace. The 2019 print of her 2012 work, All of the nightmares got here at the moment, 2012/2019, is a chief instance of the group nude talked about above.