Great expectations

There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and in Europe, showing recently at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2003. This is her first major solo exhibition in Britain.

Its reception has been mixed. Magazine profiles tend to stress her impeccable pedigree (her father is the late David Sylvester, her mother the distinguished novelist Shena Mackay), and dilate upon the primary subject matter of her painting — sex. British critics, a notoriously curmudgeonly lot, like to show that they aren’t easily impressed, even by bravura paintwork and international sales. Consequently, a couple of the broadsheets consider she has been over-hyped, though Richard Dorment in the Telegraph calls her work ‘dazzling’ and Jackie Wullschlager in the FT thinks that ‘for sheer painterly verve’ this is ‘the most interesting show by a living artist in England this year’.