Step into Serpentine South, and the air feels charged with an undeniable painterly gravity. In Picture Making, her first major UK solo presentation since 2005, British-born, New York-based artist Cecily Brown returns to her native soil not with a quiet retrospective, but with a visceral, tempestuous celebration of the canvas.
Positioned in the heart of Kensington Gardens, the exhibition serves as a profound love letter to city parks—those tamed, artificial sanctuaries where urban consciousness meets wild nature.
For three decades, Brown has occupied a unique, towering space in contemporary art, reconciling the raw, heroic gesturality of Abstract Expressionism with the narrative weight of European Old Masters. Yet Picture Making reveals an intimately nostalgic strand of her practice: memories of the Surrey countryside, the dark undercurrents of English folklore, and the enchanting, cautionary worlds of Beatrix Potter and Orlando the Marmalade Cat.
Taking the Eye for a Walk: The Art of Controlled Chaos
To stand before a canvas by Cecily Brown is to submit to an optical expedition. Her process rejects static composition in favor of kinetic sequence—capturing not just a frozen moment, but the live, kinetic energy of what happens five minutes before and after.
Brown famously initiates her compositions by copying figures from classical masterworks, children’s illustrations, or even everyday jigsaw puzzles. This deliberate anchor prevents the work from collapsing prematurely into pure abstraction, allowing human forms to drift in and out of focus.
In her Nature Walk series (2024), six works anchored around a single recurring motif—a winding stream, scrubland, fallen trunks, and bullrushes—challenge the viewer to a game of visual detection. In Nature Walk with Paranoia, the foliage feels alive with unseen eyes, while in The Charmed Water, a bruised grey sky presses down upon the landscape, transforming a serene park stroll into a psychodrama.
Eroticism, Decay, and the Shadow of Bosch
Throughout the exhibition, human bodies merge seamlessly into the landscape. Flesh is not merely depicted; it is built out of paint.
In Couple (2003–04), a stroke of crimson highlights bare flesh amidst tangled greenery, creating an intimate, secretive sanctuary. Yet Brown’s vision of nature is rarely pastoral bliss. Like Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, her idyllic landscapes harbor anti-delights.
In A Green and Pleasant Picture (2024), the glowing lime hues oscillate between lush, healthy turf and stagnant, poisonous runoff. In The Last Shipwreck (2018), tumultuous blues, peaches, and blacks collide, yielding a visceral sensation of weight, wreckage, and historical catastrophe.
Spatial Dynamics: The Choreography of Scale
The curation at Serpentine South mirrors the bodily rhythm of Brown’s painterly technique. By alternating monumental canvases with small, concentrated studies, the installation demands constant physical adaptation from the viewer.
Large-scale works like A Round Robin (2023–24) feel distinctly theatrical, bearing the physical sweep of the artist’s full arm movements. Conversely, smaller works—some hung high on the gallery walls—act as intimate, intense secrets, forcing visitors to change their posture and look anew.
Ultimately, Picture Making demonstrates that for Cecily Brown, painting is not a medium for delivering flat declarations. It is an endlessly unfolding process—a struggle to capture life’s shifting, tangled beauty using nothing more than oil, linen, and pure, intoxicating color.