Cecily Brown’s High Society marks a moment where painting fractures into seduction, tension, ambiguity, and control all at once. Painted in 1997–98, this pivotal canvas sits at the center of the moment she breaks open gesture, figuration, and abstraction at the same time. For Brown herself, this was the one early painting she would still want to keep. The work became the titular centerpiece of her breakthrough Projects exhibition and set the standard for the generation that would redefine painting at the turn of the millennium.
High Society is not only influential because of when it was made, but because of what it claimed for painting as a medium moving forward. Irony, Hollywood, Broadway artifice, erotic urgency, and the density of oil paint itself are pulled into an arena where flesh threatens to become pigment, and pigment threatens to become alive. This pivotal early masterpiece will now come to auction on 18 November at Sotheby’s as part of the NOW & Contemporary Evening Auction in New York.
