The Museum of Fine Arts presents works by Cecily Brown through Jan. 15.

This exhibition of 18 canvases, some of which are quite large, surveys Brown’s mature work representing the years of 1997 to the present.

Brown’s passion for the medium of painting has resulted in ambitious works, revealing her respect for and admiration of art history. From Francisco de Goya and Nicolas Poussin to the British landscape painters and the gestural abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell, Brown excavates the past while infusing 21st-century painting with “a decidedly feminine viewpoint.”

The figure and human flesh are of keen interest to Brown, who, like Lucien Freud, has equated paint with flesh and created unabashedly luscious surfaces.