Cecily Brown Returns to London With a Restless, Immersive New Body of Work

In Picture Making at The Serpentine, Cecily Brown displays her masterful approach to painting, characterized by vigorous brushworks, a vivid sense of colour and dynamic compositions. London-based Art Advisor Jacqueline Nowikovsky got a sneak peek of the show in the center of Hyde Park before it opens to the public on March 27^th and will run through until September 6^th. 

Where Image and Landscape Begin to Blur

To spend time looking at Cecily Brown’s work means to give in to the pull of her paintings. Her works refuse to settle, best known for images that shift, dissolve and re-form you the longer you stay with them. Stepping into the Serpentine Galleries from Kensington Gardens, it becomes briefly unclear where the park´s foliage ends and her canvases begin.

It is hard to believe that she hasn´t had an institutional show in the U.K. since her 2005 exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. Picture Making marks Brown’s first major solo presentation of paintings and represents a homecoming for the British artist who has worked in New York for the past thirty years. This however is not a retrospective. The show includes new works, that she made specifically with this exhibition in mind, alongside the artist´s  selection of key paintings dating back to 2001. What they have in common is a theme of woodland scenes and park life, that has long formed the backdrop of Brown’s explorations of lovers and figures appearing in wild nature. 

Cecily Brown Painting in Motion

Cecily Brown’s exhibition at Serpentine Galleries unfolds like a walk through a garden where nothing holds still for long – not the amorous couples, not the light, not even the act of looking itself. They all flicker in and out of view and nothing ever quite settles into focus. Brown’s paintings are dense, gestural and perpetually in flux. By staging such a continual emergence and dissolution of form, the lovers, animals and fragments of nature surface briefly before slipping back into paint. The effect is not ambiguity for its own sake, but a sustained refusal of closure that questions our very conditions of seeing.

This is particularly interesting in the current landscape of emerging art. At a moment when much contemporary painting leans toward graphic clarity and rapid readability Cecily Brown insists on painting as something that unfolds over time, through looking. The resulting works reward repeated engagement, a quality increasingly valued by serious collectors.

It is equally compelling to see how she treats nature. The garden is not pastoral backdrop but a psychological terrain. It is the site where pleasure, memory and unease coexist. Brown’s references to the childhood imagery of picture books, tales and nursery rhymes are present and constantly tipping toward the uncanny. Figures appear half-submerged in idyll and disorientation. Beauty coexists next to menace and a sense of lurking darkness. What emerges is an English sensibility for the landscape, but one filtered through distance, time and atmosphere.

An Enduring Challenge to Contemporary Painting

Ultimately, Picture Making affirms Brown’s position not simply as a leading painter of her generation, but as one of the few artists consistently testing what painting can still do. It shows that there can be beauty alongside chaos and risk-taking. In the tradition of Abstract Expressionism, every inch of Brown´s canvasses vibrates with gestural rhythm and liveliness. 

The exhibition does not seek resolution. It sustains a state of slippage where images flicker and meanings shift. And where the act of looking remains open. For collectors and art lovers alike, that openness is precisely the point. Brown’s paintings are not fixed objects; they are ongoing experiences, works that continue to unfold long after the first encounter.

If you walk up to its second space in the North Galleries, Serpentine currently also displays another British master of nature with a ninety-meter frieze by David Hockney. A Year In Normandie is a new painting, that displays his lifelong affirmation that simple beauty is worth celebrating. A rather different reflection on nature but equally woven into a dialogue with Hyde Park. What a wonderful treat to be able to immerse ourselves into so many versions of lush splendour this spring.