2026 Fall New-York Marquee Auctions
Cecily Brown
Upcoming Lots
Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017
Expanding Horizons: The Hedreen Collection
Sotheby’s New-York: 16 November 2026
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
GUARANTEED PROPERTY
Cecily Brown | Untitled (Shipwreck) | The Now and Contemporary
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017
Oil on linen
97-1/8 x 152 inches (246.7 x 386.1 cm)
Signed and dated 2017 (on the reverse)
Of Siren Tears, 2020-21
Property from a Private Collection, Tokyo
Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2026
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
Cecily Brown | Of Siren Tears | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 |
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Of Siren Tears, 2020-21
Oil on canvas
17-1/8 x 12-5/8 inches (43.5 x 32.1 cm)
Signed and dated 20-21 (on the reverse)
Untitled, 2012
Expanding Horizons: The Hedreen Collection
Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2026
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
WORK ON PAPER
Cecily Brown | Untitled | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 | Sotheby’s
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Untitled, 2012
Gouache and watercolor on paper
24×18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated 2012 (on the verso)
Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017
Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017
Expanding Horizons: The Hedreen Collection
Sotheby’s New-York: 16 November 2026
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
GUARANTEED PROPERTY
Cecily Brown | Untitled (Shipwreck) | The Now and Contemporary
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Untitled (Shipwreck), 2017
Oil on linen
97-1/8 x 152 inches (246.7 x 386.1 cm)
Signed and dated 2017 (on the reverse)
Currents of cobalt, cerulean, and lapis blue eddy and whirl across the expansive canvas of Cecily Brown’s Untitled (Shipwreck), forming a maelstrom of pigment that is emblematic of the artist’s prodigious mastery of painterly abstraction. Executed in 2016, Untitled (Shipwreck) represents Brown’s theatrical rendition of a seascape, recounting an art-historically recursive narrative with contemporary resonance.
“I’m interested in the human need or desire to represent itself. I’m fascinated with human narcissism and obsessions with bodies.”
Cecily Brown in her studio. Photo © Mark Hartman. Art © 2026 Cecily Brown
The present work is one in a cycle of paintings based on nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting, namely Eugène Delacroix’s The Shipwreck of Don Juan and Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, all of which were unveiled in an exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2017. Standing at a panoramic scale, Untitled (Shipwreck) submerges the viewer in its oceanic depths, demanding a durational process of looking that rewards the viewer with an intrinsic quietude that belies Brown’s frenetic brushwork. A tour de force of painterly gesture, Untitled (Shipwreck) embodies Brown’s commitment to wrestling her subjects free from their conventional contexts, resulting in paintings that fluctuate between perceptible and imperceptible form.
Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819. Louvre, Paris. Image © Bridgeman Images
Replete with lush impasto and sumptuous chromatic passages, the present work sees Brown’s virtuosic command of paint on full display. Amidst a tidal vortex of rich blues and creamy whites, ribbon-like strokes of green, coral, and yellow evoke the ripples and refractions of water, while gusts of murkier charcoal frame the composition. The converging momentum and direction of Brown’s brushstrokes bestow Untitled (Shipwreck) with a gravitational centrality. Brown’s loose gestures coalesce into new forms, distorting spatial depth and suggesting fragments of figurative representation in an endless churning of organic matter.
“I think that painting is a kind of alchemy, the paint is transformed into image, and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing.”
Left: Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1979. Private Collection. Sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2022 for $34.8 million. Art © 2021 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Right: Joseph Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Image © 2026 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved. / Henry Lillie Pierce Fund / Bridgeman Images
Within the present composition, glimpses of pink, flesh-toned paint echo the bathing nudes of classical tradition, a subject that is also alluded to in the present work’s title. Built up with layers of sumptuous oil paint, the surface of Untitled (Shipwreck) is replete with all the sensuality of the human figure, which remains at the core of Brown’s iterative process. Echoing Géricault’s rhythmic system of triangles, Brown’s robust gestures obscure and deconstruct a singular reading as bodies and forms break down into restless, sinuous, and elusive activity. In an impossible feat of aesthetic sorcery, Brown manages to retain all the overindulgence of the Rococo style, the grandeur of the Old Masters, and the airy lightness of the Impressionists, while opening new pathways to representation.
Unabashedly engaging with the medium’s material presence and the ambiguity of present narrative, Untitled (Shipwreck) appeals directly to the senses, eliciting pleasure and awe in equal measure. Brown graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the early 1990s, where she focused on painting, innovating and investing the practice with a renewed energy and cultural significance.
“The boundaries of painting excite me. You’ve got the same old materials—just oils and a canvas—and you’re trying to do something that’s been done for centuries… I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention.”
Julie Mehretu, Ghosthymn (after the Raft), 2019-21. Private Collection. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging. Art © 2026 Julie Mehretu
In Untitled (Shipwreck), Cecily Brown presents an allegorical and turbulent vision that synthesizes all the lush and dramatic suspense of her Romantic source material, while melding the representational into an abstracted plane. Freeing subject matter to transcend classical narrative by synthesizing practices from centuries of artistic practice, Brown’s practice emerges as a triumphant summation of Western art history and a unique new voice of aesthetic prowess and wit. In doing so, Brown achieves a novel alchemy within her paintings that distinguishes her as a contemporary master of the painterly medium.
Of Siren Tears, 2020-21
Of Siren Tears, 2020-21
Property from a Private Collection, Tokyo
Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2026
Estimated: USD 700,000 – 1,000,000
Cecily Brown | Of Siren Tears | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 |
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Of Siren Tears, 2020-21
Oil on canvas
17-1/8 x 12-5/8 inches (43.5 x 32.1 cm)
Signed and dated 20-21 (on the reverse)
Iridescent and jewel-like, Cecily Brown’s Of Siren Tears exemplifies the artist’s thrilling painterly language, transmuting centuries of art historical precedent into a shimmering, twisting landscape both timeless and urgently contemporary. Executed on an intimate scale, the present work embodies Brown’s masterful grasp on color, its vivid tonalities capturing the mythological and historical Siren subject. Of Siren Tears is a masterful embodiment of Brown’s inimitable application of oil on canvas; she imbues the medium with the power to completely entrance its viewer, drawing them in towards the luminescent surface. The work’s viscous streaks of darkly radiant paint erupt into a microcosm of chromatic brilliance that exists in the liminally miraculous space between abstraction and figuration. Brown does not merely reflect the past: she reconfigures it, pushing historical genres like the pastoral or bucolic into a new territory. Inviting viewers to immerse themselves in the vibrant forms of the present work, Brown commands a dimension charged with vivacity and indulgence, thus encapsulating the ethos of her singular artistic project.
Rooted in the Western canon, Brown’s unique praxis of resplendent abstraction derives from painterly traditions, her decadent subject matter looking to Old Masters and the Baroque, while her prismatic explorations of perception recall the Impressionists. The immersive and vivid tonality, sumptuous brushwork, and visceral force in the present work also evoke the work of Abstract Expressionists masters such as Joan Mitchel and Willem de Kooning. In the dark, tangled compositions and bodily suggestions of the present work–the minute fleshy passages which swim to the surface–evoke the drama of Peter Paul Rubens and the emotional charge of Eugene Delacroix, transporting the viewer to a wholly original, kaleidoscopic realm of perception.
Figures and forms appear and vanish, flickering between legibility and dissolution, a sumptuous feast of color and movement, Of Siren Tears is an exquisite example of Brown’s seductive amalgamation of the figural and the abstract, as well as her celebration of the possibilities of oil paint in the depiction of human forms; exemplified in the present work, her oeuvre probes themes of desire, chaos, and transformation, where beauty and disorder coexist. Part of a series of paintings that draw upon mythological imagery within the canon of art history, the present work manifests bodies and faces that appear and disappear within a rich sea of pulsating cobalt, deep orange, and bright yellow brushwork. The viewer faces an exquisite network of colliding pigment, comprising a composition that is in a constant state of flux. Omitting any sense of gravity or defined space, Brown’s painterly language distorts reality, capturing within the canvas centuries of art historical technique and visual memory, imbuing the work with a gravitas that resonates immediately with the viewer, while also sustaining an unmistakably contemporary sensibility.
Untitled, 2012
Untitled, 2012
Expanding Horizons: The Hedreen Collection
Sotheby’s New-York: 17 November 2026
Estimated: USD 150,000 – 200,000
WORK ON PAPER
Cecily Brown | Untitled | Contemporary Day Auction | 2026 | Sotheby’s
CECILY BROWN (b. 1969)
Untitled, 2012
Gouache and watercolor on paper
24×18 inches (61 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated 2012 (on the verso)
“I’m trying to be in a space between abstraction and figuration… The place I’m interested in is where my mind goes when it’s trying to make up for what isn’t there. When something is just suggested.”
Edouard Manet, The luncheon on the grass, 1863. Musée d’Orsay, Paris