The British painter Cecily Brown is fixated on shipwrecks. Looking back to the early 19th century—the small boats in big storms painted by Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault; William Etty’s massive 1827 painting The Siren and Ulysses, which depicts a scene from Homer’s Odyssey—Brown has taken inspiration from troubled vessels for the past few years. A number of her shipwreck works—abstract paintings that zero in on small gestures and feelings of disaster—form part of her first solo exhibition in Japan. In addition, a second body of work is a response to her own paintings of the 1990s and early 2000s. Brown describes this as a process: she captures a moment, lets it sit for decades, then revisits the moment to see how time has changed her thinking. —J.D.