Cecily Brown at Blenheim Palace

Considered one of the foremost painters of her generation, acclaimed British artist Cecily Brown is best known for her large-scale, vivid, gestural paintings which toy between abstraction and figuration in turn. For her exhibition, Brown developed a significant new body of work responding to Blenheim Palace’s history as an English country estate and as the home to successive generations of the Spencer-Churchill family and their world-renowned permanent collection of paintings, tapestries and decorative arts. This was the first exhibition in the Foundation’s programme to be comprised entirely of new work created in response to the Palace, and the first devoted to contemporary painting.

Providing charged re-interpretations of pastoral imagery, hunting scenes and bucolic Victorian fairy painting, Brown – who has been based in the US for the last 25 years – offered an international perspective on her British heritage, critically and sensually exploring the nostalgic fantasies of the British stately home in the popular imagination. Brown’s works evoke a dream-like vision of the past, reflecting on the Palace’s artworks as symbols of power and influence, their images and narratives still informing perceptions of Britain today.