Cecily Brown’s Exhibition, Triumph of the Vanities, Opens September 24 at the Met Opera

New York, NY (September 20, 2018) — The Metropolitan Opera’s visual arts initiative, Gallery Met, will open a new, season-long show by Cecily Brown on September 24. The British-born artist’s new works, inspired by the Met’s new season and the house itself, will be exhibited in various public spaces throughout the building.

The focal pieces will be two large paintings, almost 26-feet in width, on the Grand Tier and Dress Circle of the opera house, titled Triumph of the Vanities I and Triumph of the Vanities II. Both are oil on linen and were painted in 2018. The exhibition will also include a number of studies on view on the Parterre level, and in the north and south lounge areas on the Orchestra level.

This exhibition marks a change in location for Gallery Met.  Previous exhibitions have mainly been presented in a space of its own in the south lobby of the Met, an area that is now being renovated to create a new entrance for Patrons and Subscribers. Going forward, Gallery Met will continue to bring work from contemporary artists into the Met’s public spaces in a variety of ways.

“Cecily is one of the most daring and powerful voices in contemporary art today,” says Dodie Kazanjian, founder and director of Gallery Met, “and one of the great colorists of her generation. I’m delighted to have her and her work inaugurate Gallery Met’s new program, expanding from its initial ground floor gallery to all corners of the Met’s grand public spaces.”

Cecily Brown’s work is included in public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.  A 20-year survey of her paintings, drawings, and prints, CECILY BROWN: Where, When, How Often and with Whom, opens this November at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen.  Her highly acclaimed 2016 show, Rehearsal, at The Drawing Center in New York, traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California earlier this year.Other solo Brown museum exhibitions have appeared at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2002); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2004); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (2005); Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2006); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2006–07); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2009); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2010); and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (2014).

Cecily Brown is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York.