Cecily Brown’s Serpentine Show Turns a “Nature Walk” Into a Test of Seeing
A fallen log crossing a stream is an image so familiar it can feel like visual wallpaper. In “Cecily Brown: Picture Making,” now on view at Serpentine South in London, British artist Cecily Brown (b. 1969) takes that seemingly innocuous motif and worries it like a knot, returning to it again and again until it becomes something else entirely: a restless field of paint where figuration keeps surfacing, then dissolving.
The exhibition’s new “nature walk” paintings begin from an unexpected source. Rather than sketching outdoors, Brown borrowed the log-over-water composition from the illustration on a jigsaw puzzle. From there, she repeatedly reworks the scene with her characteristically exuberant brushwork, shifting palette, scale, and emphasis so that the same structure can read as landscape one moment and near-abstraction the next. The point is not to “solve” the image, but to watch how meaning is made — and unmade — through paint.
That slippage between abstraction and representation has long been central to Brown’s practice, which helped propel a renewed appetite for painting in the early 21st century. Her canvases reward a kind of active looking: the eye roams, latches onto a possible narrative, then questions whether it has simply projected one — like finding animals in clouds. Brown has described the sensation she wants as something just out of reach. “I want it to be the same feeling as when a word is on the tip of you tongue, but you can’t quite remember it,” she says in the exhibition guide, framing painting as a space for provisional interpretations.
Eroticism, too, remains a recurring current. In “Couple” (2003–04), entwined bodies appear amid a thicket of marks, the pleasure of the encounter complicated by the way flesh and foliage blur into one another. Brown’s taste for art-historical quotation is present here as well, with Rococo sensuality among the references that flicker through her compositions. As she puts it, “I love the idea of the very romantic river or lake,” adding, “And the follies — so many people must have fooled around in them.”
Alongside the paintings, Brown introduces newer works made for the Serpentine exhibition that draw on vintage British children’s books, including Beatrix Potter, Ladybird books, and Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat. The resulting ink drawings can appear disarmingly charming at first glance. Yet Brown’s long-standing interest in anthropomorphized animals — a thread in her work since the late 1990s, when frolicking bunnies helped bring her early attention — carries an edge: the sweetness is never entirely safe, and menace is never far away.
Not every work lands with equal force. “A Round Robin” (2023–24), installed in the exhibition, is described as a monumental canvas that risks swallowing the viewer, offering few stable cues to hold onto. By contrast, “Canopy” (2004) is cited as a more concentrated success: a blur of leaves and branches whose disorder feels earned, echoing nature’s own unruly structure. “The Serpentine Picture” (2024) — an aerial view of the gallery set against a strikingly lurid yellow ground — reads as more abrupt, as if assembled quickly for the occasion.
The show also carries the charge of a homecoming. Brown has lived in New York for more than three decades and is widely recognized internationally, even as she remains a complicated figure in the U.K. context. When she moved in the mid-1990s, London’s attention was dominated by the Young British Artists, whose deliberately provocative sculpture and installation practices set the tone. Brown’s painterly lineage — with the gravitational pull of figures like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon — placed her adjacent to that moment rather than at its center.
At Serpentine South, “Picture Making” makes a case for Brown’s enduring subject: not landscape, not narrative, not even eroticism, but the unstable act of looking itself. The log over the stream may begin as a puzzle illustration, but in Brown’s hands it becomes a reminder that images are never simply found — they are constructed, negotiated, and, finally, imagined into being.
