This spring 2025, the Barnes Foundation will present the East Coast premiere of Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations a major mid-career retrospective of pioneering British painter Cecily Brown. Co-organized by the Barnes and the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA), this exhibition is the largest presentation of Browns work in the U.S. to date and her first solo exhibition in Philadelphia. Co-curated by Simonetta Fraquelli, independent art historian and consultant curator for the Barnes, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck, the Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, the exhibition spans three decades of Browns career, showcasing her subversive reconfiguration of art history and contemporary culture. This exhibition will be on view in the Roberts Gallery from Sunday, March 9, through Sunday, May 25. It will be the first exhibit to fully explore Cecily Browns work through the lens of its groundbreaking reconfiguration of cultural politics. Bringing together more than 30 large-scale paintings and works on paper that highlight Browns subversion of gendered tropes in art history and popular culture, the exhibition sheds light on her practice. The exhibition reveals how she reclaimed expression through gestures associated with an earlier generation of male artists, a style largely out of favor with her peers, to create dynamic, and creative paintings, and moving between figuration and abstraction. Featuring paintings and works on paper from prominent institutional and private collections, Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations is organized around scenes and motifs prevalent throughout visual culture, including the boudoir, the garden, the hunt, and the shipwreck. Browns references range from centuries-old European paintings to contemporary pop songs. She subverts her sources messages and the natural world, complicating the gendered stereotypes of traditional genres. Brown continually reexamines art history with contemporary issues in mind while revisiting her own works to generate new compositions. The Barnes Foundation is located at 2025 Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. To learn more, visit www.barnesfoundation.org.