“They came to me only about six months before it was due to open, saying, ‘Cecily, we’re doing this thing, and we would love, if there’s any chance, to get a painting for the restaurant,’” she said. “Well, I can’t make a painting specifically for you that you could hang. I don’t have anything that’s 30-feet long kicking around.”
But Brown had always wanted to paint a mural on a restaurant, and was just waiting for someone to ask.
“I did say, ‘Well, why don’t I just do something directly on the wall?’”
She had painted a mural in Buffalo a few years back, through Stefania Bortolami’s Artist/City program, and found it liberating to make public work freed from the shackles of the price tag.
“With the greedy, voracious art market, the minute you have a painting these days, the question of price starts swirling around, insurance, and all those unsexy things,” she said. “I don’t want people sitting there saying, ‘Oh, how much is it?’ So by doing it directly on the wall, it completely gets past all that. It can’t be moved. It’s not for sale. It’s never for sale. It actually belongs to me. It’s very freeing.”
It’s also very Cecily Brown, very much in the thrust of her practice as a painter drawn toward the existential question of excess—excess sex, yes, a theme present in her work, but also culinary excess, which crops up quite often. Take Lobsters, Oysters, Cherries, and Pearls (2020), seen at her solo show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023—heaping platters of seafood spread across a table, begging to be masticated and savored. At Paula Cooper, in 2020, were a series of bravura paintings that dealt directly with gustatory bigness. A lush buffet supper with a woman, partially nude, imbibing. The Splendid Table is a massive triptych showing caught game—geese, ducks, rabbits, deer—ready for slaughter, flame, and feast.
