Cecily Brown: The Lady and the Swan

Eight variations on a single borrowed image: Cecily Brown's Lady and the Swan cycle takes Franz Marc's 1907 sketchbook grisaille of Leda and the swan and works it into a sequence in which the mythological seduction dissolves into paint.

The catalogue accompanies Brown's exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München in the Pinakothek der Moderne, and the project began in the collection's own study room, where Brown examined Marc's tempera and chalk double-page from Sketchbook II in September 2021. It runs 88 pages with 35 colour plates, in German and English, and was issued in a limited edition with a four-colour screenprint on a Contesse silk-linen cover; a signed edition was also produced. The paintings and works on paper reproduced here were shown in Munich and again in Brown's exhibition The Spell at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, in autumn 2022.

Brown (born 1969, London) has painted for three decades in the difficult territory between abstraction and figuration, repeatedly returning to art history (Rubens, Goya, Hogarth, Bruegel) not as quotation but as raw material to be pulled apart. Her survey Death and the Maid opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year.