There is something elusive yet immediately recognizable about Cecily Brown's work. A painting that always seems on the verge of slipping away, oscillating between figuration and abstraction, sensuality and excess, pleasure and anxiety.
At the Serpentine South gallery in London, the British artist presents "Picture Making," an exhibition that acts both as a return to his roots and as a revealing of his pictorial process. More than a retrospective or a simple thematic display, the project reveals a philosophy of painting in motion, permeated by doubt, memory, and the instability of perception.
Having lived in New York for over thirty years, Cecily Brown returns to exhibit in the city where she was trained, and especially in a place steeped in personal history. Kensington Gardens, with its paths, undergrowth, ponds, and clearings, literally nourishes the works on display. Nature never appears as mere scenery, but as a mental space, an unstable theater where bodies emerge, transform, or dissolve. The park becomes an extension of an imagination where impulses, desire, and anxiety coexist in a state of constant tension.
Cecily Brown's paintings never depict a clearly identifiable narrative: they suggest, they unsettle, they resist any immediate interpretation. Figures—embracing couples, fleeting silhouettes, almost ghostly children—appear and then vanish within the paint itself. The viewer's gaze is constantly engaged, forced to adjust, to retrace, to reconstruct the image. Nothing is presented from the outset. The canvas is built up through successive layers, through overpainting and erasure, leaving visible the traces of the gesture, of the artist's body, and of the time spent painting. Painting becomes an action, almost a physical struggle with the surface.
In "Picture Making," new works engage in a dialogue with older paintings, notably those from the early 2000s. This temporal interplay highlights the profound coherence of a visual vocabulary obsessed with recurring motifs: flesh, landscape, desire, but also latent danger and a loss of bearings. Cecily Brown constantly returns to the same images, not out of fixation, but to experience them differently. Each revisiting is a variation, each variation a shift in meaning. Repetition becomes a tool for exploration rather than a form of confinement.
Cecily Crown, Untitled (Boating), 2021-2025, ©Cecily Brown 2025
The exhibition also reveals a more intimate side of his work through drawings and monotypes. The enduring influence of classic British children's literature is evident, from Beatrix Potter to the renowned Ladybird Books publications. But in Brown's work, innocence is never entirely untouched, always tinged with a shadow, a latent ambiguity. Animals become human doubles, scenes of walks transform into mental wanderings, and tales take on unsettling, almost disturbing tones.
What is striking throughout the exhibition is the way the paintings reject any stable narrative. The scenes seem familiar, almost recognizable, yet they defy any definitive interpretation. Bodies merge with trees, water, or vegetation. The boundaries between the living and their environment gradually disappear. Nature is neither a refuge nor a serene ideal: it is a place of metamorphosis, sometimes of threat, where identities become blurred.
At the Serpentine South gallery, Cecily Brown's paintings resonate particularly strongly: the large windows, the immediate proximity to the park, and the changing light accentuate the permeability between inside and outside, between the artwork and the world. The viewer is never a mere detached observer, but is drawn, both physically and mentally, into a space where the gaze must accept getting lost in order to better find its way back.
With "Picture Making," Cecily Brown confirms her unique position in contemporary painting. Her work seeks neither easy seduction nor explicit narrative, but engages the body, memory, and gaze in a continuous movement. It is an open, unstable, profoundly alive painting that continues to transform as it is viewed.
“Cecily Brown: Picture Making”
Serpentine South
Kensington Gardens, London (England)
From 27 March to 6 September 2026
