This spring, Serpentine South will host Picture Making, a highly anticipated exhibition featuring new and recent works by British painter Cecily Brown. Running from 27 March to 6 September 2026, the show marks a homecoming for Brown, who has lived and worked in New York for the past thirty years, and her first solo institutional exhibition in the UK since 2005.
Over her three-decade career, Brown has become celebrated for her vigorous brushwork, dynamic all-over compositions, and vivid sense of colour. Picture Making brings together works inspired by Serpentine’s unique location in Kensington Gardens, a site of personal significance for the artist. Nature and park life—amorous couples, woodland walks, and whimsical encounters—have long shaped Brown’s practice, and here she revisits familiar motifs while creating new works specifically for the exhibition.
The exhibition juxtaposes these new pieces with key paintings dating back to 2001, offering insight into the evolution of her practice. Recent monotypes and drawings provide further context, drawing on early memories of the English landscape, children’s book illustrations, and the darker undertones of nursery rhymes and cautionary tales. Brown’s paintings often blur the line between figuration and abstraction: bodies merge with their surroundings, figures appear and disappear, and narrative is intentionally disrupted, inviting viewers to engage actively with the work.
In works such as Froggy would a-wooing go and Little Miss Muffet (2024–2025), Brown collapses perspective, allowing her energetic brushstrokes to shape the composition. Earlier works, including Bacchanal (2001) and Couple(2003–2004), demonstrate her sensuous handling of paint, alternating between revealing and concealing imagery. A series of ‘nature walk’ paintings, created for the exhibition, evolves a single motif—a fallen log bridging a river—across varying scales, formats, and colour palettes, demonstrating Brown’s ongoing interest in repetition and variation.
Brown draws inspiration from a wide visual lexicon, including Beatrix Potter, Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat, and vintage Ladybird books, exploring the ways animals can stand in for human experience. Her work is intensely physical, with each brushstroke tracing the gestures of her movement across the canvas, creating surfaces that are alive with energy and texture.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue designed by internationally acclaimed graphic designer Irma Boom, featuring an in-depth interview with Serpentine’s Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, excerpts from Brown’s correspondence with British painter Celia Paul, and a creative response by poet Isabel Galleymore.
Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Director of Programme & Chief Curator, and Kit Gurnos, Assistant Exhibitions Curator, have curated the show, which offers audiences the chance to experience Brown’s rich, expressive work in the context of London’s iconic Royal Park. The exhibition also includes two original print editions—a giclée print and a large-format etching and silkscreen—released in small editions to coincide with the show.
As Brown herself notes, “The Serpentine holds such an important place in the hearts of the public… it’s a huge honour to be having my first institutional show in London at a site so full of memories but that is still so exciting and unique today.”
With Picture Making, Brown reasserts her position as one of today’s most important painters, offering London audiences an immersive experience of her densely layered, visually compelling world.
