Adoration of the Lobster

Brown began Adoration of the Lobster during the course of her 2023 survey exhibition at The Met, Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, which explored key themes in her work, including still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas. The painting draws in part upon Brown’s extensive study of The Five Senses (1617–18), a series of allegorical paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, housed in the Prado, Madrid. These complex seventeenth-century works feature multilayered compositions often with the recurring motif of the picture gallery.

Dominated by an inky purple background conjuring a nocturnal setting, at the center of Adoration, crimson passages, pastel strokes, and multicolored lines offer fleeting articulations of the titular lobster (influenced by Brown’s study of Frans Snyders), interior spaces of mirrors and windows, and the fugitive presence of figures. The dense composition uses a printed version of Brown’s earlier canvas, No You for Me (2013), turned on its side as an underlayer, though the earlier composition is no longer visible beneath the thickly-painted surface. Reflecting on this technique, Brown described using digital prints of her own work as a painting ground "like a stage." She added, "[I find it] a great jumping-off point, rather than having to make it up yourself... Painting on reproductions of my own and now other people's images makes so much sense after having copied them forever. It's like doing a cover of someone else's song."[1]

[1] "Window, Mirror, Stage: A Conversation with Cecily Brown," Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023, p. 105.