A poetic return to painting and memory: Cecily Brown’s exhibition at the Serpentine 

From March 27th to September 6th, 2026, Cecily Brown will take over the Serpentine with Picture Making, a major solo exhibition featuring new artworks. This significant homecoming for the London-born artist sees her expressive, large-scale paintings enter into dialogue with the city that shaped her early years.

Nature, narrative, and new works

The exhibition is centred on Brown’s unique artistic style, characterised by a dynamic interplay of colour, gesture and form. Renowned for her vigorous brushwork and immersive compositions, she creates canvases in which figuration and abstraction continuously dissolve into one another. Drawing inspiration from art history, literature and everyday imagery, Brown constructs scenes that feel simultaneously familiar and elusive, as if captured in a momentary instant between recognition and disappearance.

Her approach to painting is deeply physical: each work bears traces of movement, with the paint itself becoming a living, almost autonomous force. As the artist suggests, the surface both holds and releases energy, inviting viewers to engage with an active and ever-changing visual experience.

The language of Cecily Brown

Picture Making is shaped by the natural surroundings of Kensington Gardens, where the Serpentine Gallery is located. The exhibition explores themes of park life, woodland landscapes and amorous encounters, reflecting Brown’s enduring fascination with nature as both subject and atmosphere.

The presentation includes newly commissioned works created specifically for the exhibition, alongside key paintings dating back to 2001. Works such as Froggy would a-wooing go, and Little Miss Muffet (2024–2025) reveal Brown’s ability to collapse perspective and disrupt narrative, allowing figures to emerge and recede within dense, gestural surfaces.

A selection of monotypes and drawings complement the paintings, offering further insight into Brown’s artistic process and tracing influences ranging from childhood memories of the English landscape to the darker undertones of fairy tales and nursery rhymes.