Cecily Brown Brings “Picture Making” to Serpentine Galleries, Tracing Two Decades of Painting in Motion
Cecily Brown’s paintings rarely sit still. Figures appear, blur, and reassert themselves; light catches on thick passages of pigment; a scene seems to arrive mid-gesture, as if the image is still deciding what it wants to be.
That sense of perpetual becoming will be on view in “Cecily Brown: Picture Making,” opening March 27 at Serpentine Galleries in London. The exhibition pairs new paintings with works dating back to 2001, offering a concentrated look at how Brown (British, b. 1969) has sustained an ecstatic, physically driven approach to painting while continually testing the boundary between figuration and abstraction.
Serpentine’s chief curator, Lizzie Thomas Brown, framed the artist’s practice as a deliberate oscillation: Brown’s canvases move between recognizable imagery and abstract marks, she said, and “vibrate in a perpetual present tense, continually coming into being.” The remark captures a central feature of Brown’s work: the viewer is asked to read the surface both as paint — dragged, layered, and reworked — and as a field where bodies and sensuous scenes intermittently cohere.
Brown’s path to this point began in London, where she trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1990s, a period when painting had slipped out of fashion in the U.K. She relocated to New York in the early 1990s, entering a milieu that prized ambition and scale and reinforced her commitment to painting as a full-body process. The move helped cement the qualities that have become synonymous with her work: bravura brushwork, fevered flesh tones, and a nuanced command of light and shadow that keeps the eye moving across the canvas.
Institutional attention has followed. In 2022, The Metropolitan Museum of Art presented “Death and the Maid,” an acclaimed exhibition in which Brown revisited still life through a contemporary memento mori lens. The show underscored her standing as one of the most influential painters working today, and it clarified how her engagement with art history is less quotation than pressure test — a way of seeing what older genres can still hold.
That dialogue with the past remains a defining engine of her practice. Brown has studied Old Masters including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and Francisco Goya, as well as modernists such as Willem de Kooning and Joan Mitchell. From the Baroque, she draws a taste for theatrical intensity; from postwar abstraction, a belief in paint as an event that can charge the entire surface. In Brown’s hands, those lineages are not tidy references but active ingredients, folded into compositions where the image is always at risk of slipping away.
“Cecily Brown: Picture Making” arrives as a chance to see that risk — and the control behind it — across more than two decades. By placing recent work alongside paintings from 2001 onward, the Serpentine presentation promises to map how Brown’s pictorial language has evolved while keeping faith with its core proposition: that painting can be both sensual and unstable, a place where representation and abstraction are not opposites but collaborators.
For London audiences, the exhibition also offers a timely reminder of Brown’s transatlantic formation — a painter shaped by the skepticism toward painting she encountered in 1990s Britain and by the appetite for large-scale, high-stakes canvases she found in New York. If her images feel alive, it is partly because they are built from that tension: between tradition and reinvention, between the body and the brushstroke, between what can be named and what can only be sensed.
