Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, New York
October 24 to December 14, 2024
At Paula Cooper’s 534 W 21st Street space, Cecily Brown staged a lush, headlong conversation with art history under the banner The 5 Senses. The show gathered new canvases and works on paper that riff on the 17th-century allegorical suite by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens. Brown’s figures and fragments flickering in and out of legibility as if a sense organ failing, then flaring back to life. You read the paintings like a crowded room: perfume, music, flesh, fruit, and fur all press forward at once.
Brown didn’t treat “the five” as a checklist so much as a mood: sensation as excess, desire as a kind of weather. On paper, the motifs loosen, bouquets and bodies dissolving into reds and smoky grays, while the larger oils stack glances, touches, and tastes into a single field. The result is decadent but unsentimental, a reminder that pleasure and ruin are neighbors in her vocabulary.
