Cecily Brown’s painting The Haunter (2010) will headline Christie's upcoming Post-War to Present sale in London on June 25th, carrying an estimate of £2.2 million–£2.8 million ($2.95 million–$3.76 million).
The Haunter was acquired in 2011 and has since remained in the same private collection. The Christie’s sale coincides with a major exhibition of Brown’s work at London’s Serpentine Galleries. In November 2025, a new record was set for Brown’s work when her painting High Society (1997–98) sold for $9.81 million at Sotheby’s New York, soaring past its estimate of $4-6 million.
Over her three-decade career, Brown has defined a style of painting that moves fluidly between figuration and abstraction, synthesizing references from art history, literature, and memory.
The Haunter evokes what the auction house describes as a convergence of “the human, the natural and the supernatural.” In the work, Brown cites diverse influences from Francis Bacon’s portraits of Vincent van Gogh and Georg Baselitz’s fractured “heroes” to the gothic fiction of American author Shirley Jackson.
Born in London in 1969, Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art amid the rise of the Young British Artists in the early 1990s. By 1994, she relocated to New York City, and her major breakout moment came in 1997 with “*Spectacle*” her debut solo exhibition at Deitch Projects. The show was famously purchased, in its entirety, by Charles Saatchi.
Today, Brown is regarded as one of the most influential painters of her generation. Her work is held in major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. In 2023, she was the subject of a major institutional show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Other highlights from the Christie’s sale include Howardena Pindell’s Webb (2023) one of the artist’s celebrated ‘spray dot’ paintings (estimate: £180,000–£250,000 ($241,000–$335,000)); Andy Warhol’s Jackie from 1964 (estimate: £400,000–$600,000 ($537,000–$805,000); and Christo’s collage L’Arc de Triomphe Wrapped (Project for Paris) Place de l’Etoile – Charles de Gaulle (2020) (estimate: £400,000–$600,000 ($537,000–$805,000) one of the final works completed by the artist during his lifetime.
