Cecily Brown, Saboteur four times, 2019; Oil on linen and oil on U.V.-curable pigment on linen, in four parts, overall: 67 × 212 in. (170.2 × 538.5 cm.). Private Collection © Cecily Brown

No other location could better showcase Cecily Brown’s endless explorations, reinterpretations and variations of art history than the treasure trove of masterpieces at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Co-organized and co-produced with the Dallas Museum of Art, the major mid-career retrospective “Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” offers a rare opportunity to investigate and explore the full depth and breadth of her oeuvre through more than thirty works. At the center of this ambitious show is Brown’s ongoing dialogue with art history and the history of painting itself—but for the first time, the exhibition pushes further, examining her practice through the lens of cultural and identity politics and foregrounding the artist’s sensitivity to the contemporary context that has informed and influenced her work.

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Endlessly elaborating, revisiting and manipulating historical tropes and themes, Brown’s scenes unfold from the depth of fleshy layers of paint, through lush, lurking tides of color and abstract sensation, to reveal their symbolic power in evoking today’s world. As suggested by Simonetta Fraquelli, consultant curator for the Barnes and co-curator of the show alongside Anna Katherine Brodbeck, curator at the Dallas Museum of Art, Cecily Brown’s intricate work continues to reveal itself the longer one engages with it: in the slow contemplation of details entangled in a fluid orgy of color, art historical tropes and formal suggestions emerge as potent metaphors for universal themes of human existence.

During a press walkthrough, Brown says her approach to painting has always been about engaging in an unrelenting conversation with the past—with the artists and works that interested her and, more importantly, “subjects that don’t go away.” As she puts it, “I’ve always been interested in images of war, battles, sexual violence, sexual ecstasy. Images that show all the contradictions of existing side by side and being really at one with each other.”

The retrospective, on view through May 25, intentionally avoids a linear narrative. Instead, it unfolds through the tropes and themes the artist has confronted over the course of three decades, highlighting her subversive approach to art history—one that relentlessly challenges and manipulates the dynamics of gender representation and gaze bias. Painting flesh becomes, for Brown, an inquiry into the very essence of our existence as humans, suspended between bodies and psyche. An orgy of death and life, her work channels the primordial and vital impulses that ultimately shape our presence in the world.

The final image in the show remains suspended in a limbo between figuration and abstraction, as Brown consistently anchors her compositions around figures and faces that might gradually emerge through the relentless layering of gestural brushwork. As the artist explained in a 2005 interview cited in the exhibition guide, painting for her is an alchemic process—one in which paint transforms into image, and image and paint evolve into something else entirely, a third and new entity. Everything in Brown’s art exists in this tension between improvisation and control, between spontaneous abstract movements and studied compositions that break apart and unfold into a fragmented amalgam under the pressure of the former.

“When I’m physically painting, it’s quite fast. I want to be in the moment, and I make decisions very quickly,” Brown explains. “But then that’s why it’s equally important to spend the time away from it, looking at it, or even, you know, putting it aside for a few weeks so that you can see it again clearly.” She pauses in front of one of her early works from the 1990s. Inspired by hunting still lifes, the painting uses the metaphor of the rabbit to examine the........

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