Viewing Cecily Brown: Picture Making

At Serpentine Galleries, Cecily Brown returns like a storm rolling back over familiar ground – only this time, it’s lush, leafy, and just a little bit feral. Picture Making feels less like a retrospective and more like getting lost in a painting that refuses to sit still.

Brown’s canvases don’t behave. They flicker between bodies and bushes, lovers and landscapes, as if Abstract Expressionism had a flirtation with an English garden and never quite recovered. You think you see a couple tangled in the grass – blink – and it’s all petals and paint again. It’s deliciously disorienting. Made in response to Kensington Gardens, these works hum with memory and mischief. There are echoes of childhood storybooks, yes—but the kind where something slightly uncanny lurks behind the trees. Brown leans into that tension: beauty on the brink of excess, romance tipping into something wilder, more unruly.

The paint smears, streaks and pools – giving the sense Brown is at times chasing the image as much as creating it, letting figures dissolve just as they begin to declare themselves. It’s painting as pursuit, as play, as glorious near-chaos. There’s also something quietly triumphant about this show – a homecoming, after decades in New York, that feels both personal and painterly. Brown turns the classical English landscape into a site of sensual, slippery possibility.