Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Painting as a storm: bodies, gardens, desire, memory and art history dissolving into colour.
Image credit
Installation view, Serpentine South, 2026. © Cecily Brown. Photo: © Jo Underhill
Meet the artist
The Movement
Contemporary Art, PaintingArtLovers Tip
A must-see London exhibition if you love painting that does not behave — seductive, slippery, cerebral, physical, and impossible to consume in a rush.
Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see
This exhibition brings together new and recent works by British-born, New York-based painter Cecily Brown, marking a kind of homecoming after three decades living and working in New York.
Brown’s paintings sit in that charged space between figuration and abstraction. At first, you may see only movement: brushstrokes, flesh tones, greens, pinks, fragments, rhythm. Then forms begin to appear — bodies, animals, flowers, trees, erotic echoes, art-historical ghosts — before disappearing again.
For Picture Making, the setting matters. New works respond to Kensington Gardens, bringing nature, park life and the idea of getting lost into Brown’s restless painterly world. The exhibition includes works spanning from 2001 to 2025, with paintings, drawings and monotypes, according to recent coverage of the show.
Worth the trip
Because Cecily Brown reminds us that painting is not dead, decorative or passive. It can still be unstable, intelligent, sensual and difficult to fix in one meaning.
Her work matters because it refuses the clean image. In a culture of fast visuals and instant interpretation, Brown asks you to stay longer. The picture does not reveal itself immediately. You have to look, lose it, look again.
It is also significant because Picture Making is described by galleries as her first major one-person exhibition in the UK since 2005 — a major London moment for one of the most important painters working today.
How to experience it
Don’t try to “find the figure” too quickly.
Stand close first and let the paint become almost abstract. Then step back and wait for the image to assemble itself. Brown’s paintings reward patience: the longer you look, the more unstable — and alive — they become.
The perfect way to see it? Visit the show, then walk through Kensington Gardens. The trees, bodies, movement and light outside will make the paintings continue in your head.
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