‘Cecily Brown: Picture Making’ review: a beauty at Serpentine

Cecily Brown’s exhibition opens with a group of nature walk paintings. As you enter the London gallery from Kensington Gardens, where spring is finally coming into bloom, there is a sense of the exhibition mirroring its environment.

‘Hopefully it’s uplifting and it’s a bit joyous and the setting of the park is phenomenal, and very emotional for me as well,’ Brown says to Wallpaper* at the opening of ‘Cecily Brown: Picture Making at The Serpentine South’. ‘The park always cheers you up, doesn’t it? On a beautiful day, it’s hard to be sad when it’s this gorgeous. Hopefully the paintings can add another layer to that.’

Surprisingly, ‘Picture Making’ is the artist’s first substantial institutional show in the UK. Brown is what we once would have called a ‘market darling’ – not only revered by critics, but also highly commercially successful. She moved to New York from London in 1994, as she felt out of place in the London art scene, which was dominated by the Young British Artists (YBAs) at that time, and has not really looked back.

While her life is primarily in the United States and in the urban landscape of New York, her work features nature almost exclusively, meaning that many of her paintings are created from memory, photographs or a combination of both. Her painting is dramatic, sometimes frenetic, gestural and immediate. References include the history of painting and popular culture, from Breughel to the early Hugh Grant and Kristen Scott Thomas film, Bitter Moon.

We see these elements mixed effortlessly in these works made between 2001 and 2025. During this time, her work veers between the more abstract and the more figurative and back again. Some works are made quickly, and others, over months. The paintings can appear abstract at first, but as you spend time with them, figures appear and vanish into the brushwork. Some figurative elements jump out, while others are evasive, slipping in and out of view. Nature operates on its own terms, and while these works are beautiful, they are not simply a presentation of the bucolic. Couples passionately embrace, waves churn, limbs fade in and out of the greenery.

‘I don’t really like the word escape or escapism, but I do love the idea of getting lost in art, whether it’s a painting, a film, a book or music,’ says Brown. ‘I couldn’t get through life without any of those things. It’s more like it’s this parallel world, isn’t it?’

There are also many drawings on display here, taking inspiration from children’s illustrations. They are truly delightful, as are the figurative monotypes that pepper the show. Illustrations are a theme that runs through Brown’s work, with certain images recurring in multiple paintings. She copies images to understand them further.

There is always the question, these days, about making art in the face of global strife, and Brown feels that while her work can provide a break, there is also an instability or unknown in her painting that also reflects our times. ‘There is uncertainty in my work, and you’re never quite sure where you are. There’s a psychological unease that I think reflects the outside world,’ she says. ‘One does feel guilt for just being in the studio. I think Philip Guston had a famous quote – “How can I be sitting here thinking about red, yellow and blue when there’s a war on?”’