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All the Nightmares Came Today, 2012/2019

Archival print in full colours on Epson Hot Press Natural 330g/m2 paper
Signed by the artist and numbered on an archival label adhered to the reverse of artwork

Unframed: 50.8 x 61 cm (20 x 24 in.)

Edition of 100

All the Nightmares Came Today was produced during a period when Cecily Brown’s approach to the figure attained its most psychologically charged and painterly complex form of figurative abstraction. In this work, flesh is rendered both legible and dissolved, making the act of painting itself the central subject. The composition features increasingly compressed figures, with bodies that emerge and retreat within dense surfaces and gestural abstraction. This development signifies a deepening of Brown’s ongoing engagement with the Flemish Baroque tradition of Rubens and Bruegel, as well as the gestural freedoms characteristic of American Abstract Expressionism, above all de Kooning. The title, taken from David Bowie’s Oh! You Pretty Things (1971), references the music Brown listened to in her studio during the painting’s creation and serves to amplify the work’s atmosphere rather than provide a direct explanation.