The 5 Senses, 2025
Cecily Brown
Oliver Clatworthy
The Last Shipwreck, 2018
Cecily Brown
The BlackWood Gallery
Cecily Brown’s ecstatic painting practice has become a touchstone in contemporary art. Through bravura brushwork, fevered flesh tones, and a nuanced command of light and shadow, she sets bodies and sensuous scenes in motion, images surfacing and slipping between figuration and abstraction.
Born in London in 1969, Brown trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in the ’90s, a time when painting was out of fashion in the U.K. From there, she moved to New York in the early 1990s, where a culture of ambitious painting reinforced her commitment to working at scale and painting as a physical process.
Major institutional presentations have included her acclaimed 2022 exhibition “Death and the Maid” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this show, she revisited still life through a contemporary memento mori lens, reinforcing her standing as one of the most influential painters working today.
Color Etching with Brick Wall, 2003
Cecily Brown
Two Palms
Her forthcoming exhibition “Cecily Brown: Picture Making,” opening March 27th at the Serpentine Galleries in London, brings together new paintings alongside works dating back to 2001. Chief curator of Serpentine, Lizzie Thomas Brown, noted that Brown’s work “oscillates between recognizable imagery and abstract marks.” “Her paintings seem to vibrate in a perpetual present tense, continually coming into being,” she added.
Across her practice, she studies other artists closely—from Old Masters like Titian, Rubens, and Goya to modernists such as Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. She takes inspiration from art history, from the theatrical intensity of the Baroque to the physical charge of post-war abstraction, particularly in the way she uses paint across the surface of her works. As Brown took influence from others, so other contemporary artists have looked to her work as a source of inspiration. Here are seven artists working today whose approaches to painting show the influence of Brown’s impressive practice.
Heather Bause Rubinstein
B. 1975, Englewood, New Jersey. Lives and works in New York and the Catskills.
Forever after days, 2025
Heather Bause Rubinstein
Ruttkowski;68
Following a life-altering neurological diagnosis in 2023, Heather Bause Rubinstein turned to oil painting with urgency, as a means of making the most vital work she could imagine. She had first worked with the medium as an undergraduate in 1993, but soon after shifted away from traditional oils, working instead with house latex and other hardware-store materials. Her New York debut solo exhibition, “Out of the Woods,” which took place in October 2025 at Ruttkowski;68, marked a significant moment in that return. The show introduced audiences to a body of work shaped by close observation of gardens, forests, and shifting light.
In Forever After Days (2025), a large oil painting, for example, blush pinks and milky whites open the canvas up, while deep reds pool and descend. Forms hover at the edge of recognition—petals, foliage, perhaps bodily contours. Soft areas of paint contrast with dragged, layered passages that leave ridges and drips, registering the pressure of the hand and inviting the eye to wander.
“Like Cecily, I’m straddling the line between abstraction and figuration,” Rubinstein said in an interview. “I think we share an impatience with the representation/abstraction binary. She also highlighted the influence of Brown’s desire to leave “breadcrumbs of visual information” that are scattered across the picture plane.
Julia Jo
B. 1991, Seoul. Lives and works in New York.
With Newfound Strength (Hand-Embellished, Limited Edition Print), 2024
Julia Jo
ART FOR CHANGE
Brown has long been a meaningful touchstone for Brooklyn-based painter Julia Jo, who has a deep respect for Brown’s ability to portray movement and atmosphere. As Jo shared in an interview, “Though we herd our paintings into very different pastures, I am always entranced to see the singular ways Brown can leave trails within her paintings, how her works simultaneously hover above and remain grounded in our world.”
Jo’s oil paintings unfold through looping, layered, swirling strokes and bold color, where figures slip in and out of visibility. Faces and gestures appear like flashes of memory, then dissolve, creating a continual push and pull between abstraction and figuration. “I want the physicality of paint to be on center stage,” Jo added.
Her recent sold-out solo exhibition, “Beckon,” at Charles Moffett—her third with the gallery—follows growing institutional recognition, including recent acquisitions by the High Museum of Art and ICA Miami.
Eleanor Johnson
B. 1994, United Kingdom. Lives and works in Oxfordshire, U.K.
Red Sky at Night, 2025
Eleanor Johnson
Harper's
Emerging artist Eleanor Johnson’s large-scale paintings use a layered, kinetic process, as vivid corporeal forms shift and recombine across the surface. Drawing on Baroque painting, particularly the tumbling compositions of Peter Paul Rubens, she brings a sense of movement while reconsidering the body through a contemporary perspective on gender and perception.
Central to her practice is pentimento: earlier lines remain visible as she builds the painting up, a style that Brown also uses. “I like how the gaps in the painting make the viewer’s eye jump around—creating a kind of glitch in the image,” she said in an interview. In works such as Bear Hug (2025), rubbed-out areas and exposed underlayers create a sense of ongoing change, reflecting Johnson’s interest in hypnagogic hallucinations where forms drift in and out of focus.
Konstantina Krikzoni
B. 1987, Chalkidiki, Greece. Lives and works in London.
Armatura, 2025
Konstantina Krikzoni
L'Appartement
Like Brown, who reimagines historical compositions by centering female protagonists, painter Konstantina Krikzoni unsettles inherited narratives. In her works, Krikzoni draws on her upbringing by the Aegean Sea in Greece as well as new interpretations of classical mythology and iconography.
In Armatura (2025), a key work in her solo exhibition of the same name at Geneva-based gallery L’Appartement, fluid brushwork gathers intertwined figures across a luminous, shifting ground. Reclining and clustered in quiet proximity, their bodies emerge through washes of turquoise, rose, ocher, and moss, punctuated by coral and deep red. Thin veils of paint allow earlier marks to remain visible. As is frequent in her practice, female figures anchor the composition, evoking care and introspection.
As Krikzoni put it, “It feels a bit like choreographing a dance…the bodies come together as if they’re building something physical.”
Eva Helene Pade
B. 1997, Denmark. Lives and works in Paris.
Bortførelsens leg (H), 2024
Eva Helene Pade
Galleri Nicolai Wallner
Eva Helene Pade pays close attention to the female figure. The rising Danish painter grounds her nude figures in scenes animated by a luminous palette. Subtle tonal modulation and deep shadows draw intimate clusters of characters into focus against a softly diffused atmosphere.
Her process recalls Brown’s practice of working without a predetermined image, so that forms emerge through revision and accumulation. As Brown has noted, “I often lay down a wash in one colour and don’t have a clear image in mind of where I am going. I start pushing paint around until forms suggest themselves.” Pade noted this influence in an interview with Artsy: “Brown has a distinctive way of distorting the figurative into abstraction, working precisely in the gaps where an image is both forming and dissolving.”
Pade is represented by Thaddaeus Ropac—the youngest artist on the gallery’s roster. Her 2025 solo exhibition “Søgelys” presented an exploration of light, atmosphere, and presence.
Laurena Finéus
B. 1998, Ottawa, Canada. Lives and works in New York.
Memory as Fortress, Roots as Pathway, 2025
Laurena Finéus
Fridman Gallery
Cavalier de Tempête : Act I, 2025
Laurena Finéus
Luce Gallery
Brooklyn-based artist Laurena Finéus began exploring the threshold between abstraction and figuration during her MFA years at Columbia University. At that time, she began introducing collage into her artwork, bringing a greater sense of fragmentation and more destabilized compositions.
Finéus’s paintings reference her Haitian heritage through layered landscapes. In Memory as Fortress, Roots as Pathway (2025), a kaleidoscopic field emerges with ambiguous figures that evoke vegetal forms. Interlocking branches bind bodies to the painting’s background—which, according to the artist, evoke spirits of Haitian Vodou.
As Finéus noted in an interview, “I’m drawn to works that ask us to surrender our assumptions about chaos. Much like in Cecily Brown’s paintings, what initially appears chaotic often contains multiple truths, if we are willing to look closely.” Finéus will present her highly anticipated debut New York solo exhibition, “Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kolè,” with Fridman Gallery in May.
a’driane nieves
B. 1982, San Antonio. Lives and works in the Greater Philadelphia Area.
much like a perennial stretches its way through the darkness of slowly warming earth to break through surfaces hardened by winter, i have finally emerged from yet another subterranean wilderness, fuller and more tender from the bruising and abrasions of my own evolution. having chosen liberation over longing, i now stand bolder in the still of my own sun, a star reborn, 2025
a’driane nieves
Albion Jeune
For a’driane nieves, painting is a way to process memories and experiences. “Painting for me is largely a very physical process, where my full body is engaged,” she noted in an interview. She begins with repetitive, dance-like movements and mark-making. Her neurodivergence informs this process: She sees these movements as a way to invite fluidity in her body.
Reflecting on Brown’s influence, nieves recalls that it was early encounters with Brown’s work that led her to experiment with heavier paint and stiff brushes, considering how painting might register the body from within. This shift sharpened her attention to visceral elements—blood, marrow, flesh, and bone—a focus that has grown as she began exploring soft sculpture. Just like Brown, nieves uses abstraction to move beyond outward appearance, working emotions out physically in her practice.
