CECILY BROWN: PICTURE MAKING
Serpentine presents a major solo exhibition, Picture Making, featuring new works by Cecily Brown that explore themes of nature and park life.
Image: Cecily Brown: Picture Making, Serpentine South, 2026. © Cecily Brown. Photo: © Jo Underhill
Over three decades Brown has gained a reputation for her unique approach to painting, characterised by vigorous brushwork, a vivid sense of colour and dynamic all-over compositions that hold the viewer in an active space of looking.
Picture Making brings together works inspired by Serpentine’s unique location in Kensington Gardens, a site of personal significance to the artist. Themes of nature and park life have long shaped Brown’s formal explorations and, for her exhibition at Serpentine, the artist revisits familiar subjects such as amorous couples, woodland settings and uncanny nature walks.
Cecily Brown said: “The Serpentine holds such an important place in the hearts of the public and that's what makes it so exciting to be showing my work here. As a young art student in London I loved to visit, and saw exhibitions there that influenced me enormously. It's a huge honour to be having my first institutional show in London at a site so full of memories but that is still so exciting and unique today.”
Image: Cecily Brown: Picture Making, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. © Cecily Brown. Photo: © Jo Underhill
For Brown, painting is led by the medium itself and is an intensely physical process that makes visible the traces of her movements on the surfaces of her works. In paintings such as Froggy would a-wooing go and Little Miss Muffet (both 2024–2025), Brown collapses perspective, letting energetic brushstrokes shape each composition. Recognisable motifs, such as small figures inspired by Victorian fairy paintings, appear and disappear, thwarting narrative interpretation and inviting viewers to find their own entry points.
In other works, bodies merge with their surroundings, dissolving the edges between flesh and the natural world. Bacchanal (2001) and Couple (2003–2004) foreground Brown’s sensuous handling of paint, which alternates between revealing and concealing its subject. The dialogue between image and medium continues in the merging of lovers’ bodies with their watery surroundings in a series of boating scenes.
Repetition and the return to favourite motifs drive Brown’s practice, with each new variation offering a fresh perspective. A group of ‘nature walk’ paintings, created specifically for Serpentine, takes inspiration from a jigsaw puzzle illustration featuring a fallen log acting as a bridge over a river. Brown reworks this composition across different scales, formats and palettes, the subject matter the starting point for infinite variation.
Image: Cecily Brown: Picture Making, installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. © Cecily Brown. Photo: © Jo Underhill
Serpentine will publish a catalogue to accompany the exhibition, designed by internationally acclaimed graphic designer Irma Boom, featuring excerpts from Brown’s personal correspondence with British painter Celia Paul, an in-depth interview between Brown and Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a creative response by poet Isabel Galleymore.
Picture Making is curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Director of Programme & Chief Curator with Kit Gurnos, Assistant Exhibitions Curator.
This will be Brown’s first solo exhibition of paintings in a UK public institution since her show at Modern Art Oxford in 2005 and follows her presentation at Blenheim Palace in 2020.
At Serpentine South: 27 March – 6 September 2026