Photo by WatsonEvansArt on April 02, 2026. May be art of text.
By Watson Evans Art
Cecily Brown’s exhibition @serpentineuk has just opened to great fanfare. Titled ‘Picture Making’, it marks her first major UK institutional painting show since 2005 and feels like a homecoming for a British artist who has spent the past thirty years in New York.
All the works take Kensington Gardens as their inspiration and as you move through the space it does feel like the artist and curator are bringing the outside in.
My three favourites:
- Trees, a lake, a log cabin, a waterfall, a deer and a sunset, 2024
A light filled canvas full of movement, gesture and playfulness. Brown captures the feeling of wind through the trees. There is something almost classical here, like a scene lifted from mythology, yet entirely contemporary. It feels like spring and autumn at once, time passing, seasons shifting.
- Players and a Painted Stage, 2024
This smaller work stayed with me. A frame within a frame, with that familiar line coming to mind.. “all the world’s a stage…”. It feels introspective. A painting that prompts a pause, to think about the stories that play out in Kensington Gardens and the stories we tell ourselves perhaps. Brown’s painterly skill is on full display in this small work: up close you see the abstraction and the hand of the artist. Step back and it settles into a woodland scene.
- Couple, 2003-2004
This is storytelling, narrative, passion, colour and movement. A work that invites you in but makes you question whether you belong there. In keeping with the wider themes of the exhibition, it speaks to the lives and moments that unfold in the park, but here it feels more intimate. A hidden moment. The couple are alone and you are left wondering who they are and why they are there. Evocative and quietly powerful.
Which one would you choose?