Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Serpentine presents Picture Making, an exhibition featuring new and recent works by Cecily Brown. The exhibition runs from 27 March to 6 September 2026 at Serpentine South and marks a homecoming for the British artist who has lived and worked in New York for the past thirty years.
This spring, Serpentine South in London’s Kensington Gardens becomes the setting for Picture Making, a major solo exhibition by Cecily Brown, one of the most significant painters working today. Running from 27 March to 6 September 2026, the show brings together new and recent works alongside key paintings dating back to 2001, offering an expansive view of an artist whose practice has continually evolved while remaining anchored to a set of deeply personal preoccupations.
Born in London in 1969, Brown studied at the Slade School of Fine Art under the influence of British painter Maggi Hambling, graduating with a BFA in painting in 1993. An exchange programme at the New York Studio School proved transformative, and in 1994 she relocated to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since. Over the past three decades, she has built an international reputation through exhibitions at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
Picture Making marks a homecoming of sorts. Kensington Gardens holds personal significance for Brown, who visited the Serpentine as a young art student and credits it with shaping her artistic development. As she puts it: “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.”
The exhibition takes themes of nature and park life as its central concern, with Brown revisiting familiar motifs — amorous couples, woodland settings, uncanny nature walks — through her characteristically vigorous brushwork and dynamic, often sensual, all-over compositions. A group of ‘nature walk’ paintings created specifically for the exhibition takes inspiration from a jigsaw puzzle illustration of a fallen log bridging a river, reworked across varying scales, formats and palettes. Other works, including Bacchanal (2001) and Couple (2003–2004), show bodies dissolving into their natural surroundings, blurring the boundary between figure and landscape.
Drawings and monotypes round out the exhibition, drawing on sources as varied as Beatrix Potter, the Orlando the Marmalade Cat children’s books, and Victorian fairy paintings, reflecting Brown’s long-standing interest in animals as proxies for human experience.
As Bettina Kortik, CEO, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director for Serpentine, state: “The paintings and drawings on view will showcase [Brown’s] dense, expressive practice, in which painterly surfaces and shifting imagery move fluidly between recognisable figures and abstract forms… 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.”
Picture Making runs from 27 March to 6 September 2026.
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