Serpentine Galleries opens Picture Making tomorrow (27th March 2026), a major exhibition of new and recent work by Cecily Brown — marking a significant homecoming for the artist, who has lived and worked in New York for the past three decades.
Presented at Serpentine South until 6 September 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings and monotypes spanning over 25 years, alongside a new body of work made specifically in response to the gallery’s setting in Kensington Gardens.
Brown’s paintings are known for their restless, all-over compositions — dense with movement, colour and gesture — where figuration and abstraction collide. Across Picture Making, familiar motifs reappear and dissolve: lovers entwined in shifting landscapes, woodland scenes that blur into painterly abstraction, and fleeting figures that emerge only to disappear again.
The exhibition leans into Brown’s long-standing engagement with nature and park life, subjects shaped by both memory and observation. New “nature walk” paintings revisit a deceptively simple image — a fallen log crossing a stream — which the artist reworks across multiple canvases, turning it into a site of continuous variation and painterly experimentation.
Elsewhere, earlier works such as Bacchanal (2001) and Couple (2003–04) foreground Brown’s sensuous handling of paint, where bodies merge with their surroundings and narrative gives way to atmosphere. In more recent works, including Froggy would a-wooing go and Little Miss Muffet (2024–25), references to children’s stories and Victorian illustration are pulled apart and reassembled, revealing a darker, more ambiguous edge beneath their familiar imagery.
Drawings and monotypes extend this language further, drawing on sources from Beatrix Potter to vintage Ladybird books, where animals become stand-ins for human behaviour and emotion.
For Brown, the exhibition is also deeply personal. Reflecting on the show, she 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.”
Bringing together decades of work with a fresh, site-responsive perspective, Picture Making captures Brown’s ongoing commitment to painting as a physical, fluid and constantly shifting process — one that resists fixed meaning and instead invites viewers into an active, unfolding experience of looking.
Serpentine’s CEO Bettina Korek and Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist:
“We’re honoured to present an exhibition of new works by Cecily Brown in Spring 2026… It’s a remarkable opportunity for the work to resonate with the setting of the Royal Park, and we look forward to inaugurating what promises to be an exceptional season of painting at Serpentine.”
Cecily Brown, Picture Making, 27th March – 6th September 2026, Serpentine South
