Cecily Brown — Picture Making at Serpentine
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Location: Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, London
Date: March 27 – September 6, 2026
Project: Picture Making, solo exhibition of new and recent paintings, monotypes, and drawings
Why it Matters: Brown's first institutional painting show in the UK in over twenty years
Cecily Brown left London for New York in 1994. She studied at the Slade, used to visit Serpentine as a student, and hasn't had a solo in a UK public gallery since Modern Art Oxford in 2005. Picture Making is her coming back, and the location matters. The gallery sits inside Kensington Gardens, and the show is built around that. Nature, park life, couples in the woods, bodies disappearing into landscape.
New paintings made for this show sit next to work going back to 2001. Bacchanal (2001) and Couple (2003–2004) are in there, alongside new pieces like Froggy would a-wooing go and Little Miss Muffet (both 2024–2025). Brown paints the way you might remember a scene: figures appear, break apart, merge with whatever is around them. You see something and then you're not sure you saw it.
A group of "nature walk" paintings, made specifically for Serpentine, all start from the same image: a jigsaw puzzle illustration of a fallen log over a river. She paints it over and over, different scales, different palettes, different formats. The subject is just a starting point.
There are also drawings and monotypes that pull from Beatrix Potter, the Orlando the Marmalade Cat books by Kathleen Hale, and old Ladybird titles. Animals standing in for people. Children's stories with something darker underneath.
The catalogue is designed by Irma Boom and includes personal letters between Brown and painter Celia Paul, an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, and a text by poet Isabel Galleymore.
More info: serpentinegalleries.org
