Immersing the viewer in a mesmerising choreography of painterly gesture, Untitled exemplifies Cecily Brown’s prodigious fusion of rich abstraction and figurative allusion. Executed between 2015 and 2016, the present work exudes unrestrained visual pleasure and seduction inherent to Brown’s wider oeuvre. The artist has long explored the play involved in conceiving an image and painting it, a dynamic she has visualised in powerfully erotic terms. Art historian Linda Nochlin describes the mercurial eroticism of Brown’s work, as well as the highly tactile quality of the artist’s thick, seemingly kinetic swathes of paint: “In many of Brown’s paintings, it seems as though she is retaining a pictorial equivalent of that haptic ardor consuming the partners in the throes of sexual pleasure: touching, squeezing, rubbing, stroking, roiling the thick gobs of paint onto the canvas. The sense of touch, then, is at once transformed into visual equivalents in Brown’s work, but at the same time remains present to it, untransformed, in the actual, material pigment traces deposited by the forceful or subtle touch of the artist’s brush or knife on the linen canvas, so crucial to her formal and expressive enterprise” (Linda Nochlin, ‘Cecily Brown: The Erotics of Touch’, in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, London 2015, p. 351). Brown’s visual language is thus one of the body and its interactions, and the present work signifies a stimulating meditation on the nature of contemporary painting, and the role of the human figure within it.

Although abstract, the luscious brushstrokes of pink, blue, umber and taup on the surface of Untitled command an elusive and suggestive power. Brown’s aesthetic language is deeply rooted in the figurative and her large-scale paintings evoke the Renaissance and Neoclassical tradition of allegorical landscape painting. As Johanna Drucker writes,

While Brown’s work builds upon a long lineage of classical painting, her handling of pigment is also informed by the gestural mark-making of the celebrated American Abstract Expressionists, among them Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell. Indeed, Brown’s tenacious brushwork and sensual pink hues are an affirmation of de Kooning’s famous mantra that "flesh was the reason oil paint was invented", and Brown herself has described the medium as: "sensual, it moves, it catches the light, it’s great for skin and flesh and heft and meat … I wanted to make something that you couldn’t tear your eyes away from" (Cecily Brown cited in: Derek Peck, ‘New York Minute: Cecily Brown’, Another, September 14, 2012, online). Brown’s lush, free movement of pigment on the surface of the present work is reminiscent of the colour palette and brushwork of de Kooning’s 1955 masterpiece Gotham News. Like de Kooning’s composition, Untitled ambiguously hints at fleshy, bodily elements; here slippages of paint loosely delineate a leg, a breast, a hand or buttock. Yet in her own highly unique approach to abstraction, Brown fractures and buries her corporeal imagery in a vortex of frenetic strokes and scrapes. Like an artistic game of hide-and-seek, the search for visual clues in the complex maze of paint highlights the main focus of Brown's work, whereby the act of looking converges with the voyeuristic pleasure elicited by her mysterious, obscure representation of the human body.

Brown herself has described the innate sense of anticipation that she strives to capture in her work: “I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer” (Cecily Brown in conversation with Perri Lewis, ‘Cecily Brown: I Take Things Too Far When Painting’, The Guardian, 20 September 2009, online). A monumental work of energetic gesture and chromatic vibrancy, Untitled is a visceral example of Brown’s nuanced dance between abstraction and figuration, mystery and seduction.