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One of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of the last 30 years is the subject of a touring exhibition that has landed at the Barnes Foundation.

“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” is the first solo show by the artist in Philadelphia.

A co-production of the Barnes and the Dallas Museum of Art, “Themes and Variations” is an overview of some of the phases Brown’s artistic practice has gone through over the decades, beginning with the sensuously fleshy abstract works that rocketed her to fame in the 1990s, through her nearly monochrome black paintings of the early 2000s, to explorations of riotous landscapes and monumental still lifes.

Brown said the idea of assembling paintings across such a long span of her career, many of which she has not seen in two decades, was “nerve wracking.”

“It’s hard to avoid thinking of it as a summing-up of what you’ve done so far,” she said. “There’s a funny thing that happens over time. It’s not that you get less critical, but I think the further away it is from you, it starts feeling like someone else did it.”

Originally from London, Brown has been living and working in New York since 1994. Much of her work has been taking on artistic tropes from art history that have become less popular among the contemporary avant-garde –  such as the landscape, the still life and the nude odalisque – and reworking them in explosively colorful abstraction with a feminist perspective.

“This is my favorite room with the very earliest works. They’re so youthful to me,” Brown said while in the section of the exhibition called “Painting Flesh,” with works such as “High Society” (1998) and “On the Town” (1998) depicting sexual acts. “I like that sense of doing something for the first time and sort of figuring stuff out.”

“I was very naive to think people wouldn’t pay so much attention to the subject. I thought, it’s clear that they’re about color and light and surface, and the erotica falls away,” she said. “But people and critics focused so much on the subject.”

One writer who was not taken in by Brown’s exuberant methods at that time was the prominent New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, who lambasted Brown’s 2000 show at the Gagosian gallery as “lackluster,” believing her paintings were pointlessly messy and gratuitously provocative.

But recently Smith retracted her earlier criticism, proclaiming she had been wrong and calling Brown’s 2023 show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “revelatory.” The critic had come around to the artist’s method of drawing viewers into the canvas for longer periods, daring them to look slowly, to spend time unraveling her densely layered paint.

As the critic, such is the artist: Brown, also, has developed a long view on her own success.

“It would be equally possible to do a terrible show from the last 30 years if you didn’t pick out the best or the strongest works,” Brown said of the Barnes show. “Obviously, the curators have their opinions. It’s their show as much as mine.”

The curators are Anna Katherine Brodbeck of the Dallas Art Museum and Simonetta Fraquelli, a consultant curator for the Barnes. Fraquelli said Brown’s paintings, which can seem cacophonous at first blush, lure visitors to “hunt out the imagery.”

“Brown’s work compels a mode of slow looking — a method inherent in the Barnes’s educational program — in which multiple or entire scenes gradually emerge from her rich and abundant layers of paint,” she said in a statement.

For “Themes and Variations,” the curators leaned into feminism and Brown’s method of wrestling art history away from a predominately male gaze into a feminine one. She often starts with a familiar trope, such as her “Girl on a Swing” (2004), whose nominal subject is true to its title, then keeps working the surface until it becomes a uniquely painterly expression of color and contrast.

Being a “feminist” painter is a label Brown has not always welcomed.

“In the early days I tried to resist that,” she said. “As a young artist, I felt like ‘I’m just a painter. Who cares if I’m female?’ The one time I wasn’t conscious of being female was in the studio.”

Decades later, Brown more easily reads politics onto her paintings.

“When I was young it felt like feminism had triumphed and that we were all going to be OK,” she said. “The fact that it’s just gotten worse and worse in the last few decades, in a way it’s unavoidable that they start seeming more political.”

“Cecily Brown: Themes and Variations” will be on view at the Barnes Foundation until May 25.