Cecily Brown: The Triumph of Death

A book built around one painting: Cecily Brown's colossal multi-panel Triumph of Death, in which Death rides roughshod over a town and its inhabitants, answering a fresco of 1446 in the Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo.

Published on the occasion of the painting's exhibition at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, the clothbound volume runs 104 pages with 50 colour plates at 10 by 11.5 inches, in English and Italian. Gavin Delahunty edits and contributes the principal text, with an introduction by Capodimonte's director Sylvain Bellenger and essays by Catherine Foulkrod and Sergio Risaliti. Alongside details of the painting it publishes a group of previously unseen preparatory drawings, tracing how the composition was assembled and how a preoccupation with mortality that has run through Brown's work for decades arrived at this scale.

Brown (born 1969, London) moved to New York in the mid-1990s and has since built a body of painting that holds abstraction and figuration in unresolved tension. The Old Master borrowings that drive this work — Bruegel, Goya, Rubens — recur across her practice and were surveyed in Death and the Maid at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.