Cecily Brown: ‘I was too shy to talk to all these super cool kids like Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst’

She left London because her paintings felt hopelessly unfashionable compared with the work of the YBA’s. Now she’s back with a blockbuster show – and the world has come round to her point of view People say that Cecily Brown left London in the early 1990s because of the YBAs – as if, she laughs, she wanted to get away from them. “I actually had great admiration for the art being made, I just wasn’t in sync with them.” While Damien Hirst was dunking dead animals in formaldehyde and Sarah Lucas...

By Chloë Ashby