Cecily Brown Turns Pastoral Visions Into Painterly Chaos in Her London Museum Debut

Renowned British painter Cecily Brown has finally received her museum debut in London, the city where she was born and raised before making her name in New York. The homecoming is marked by a series of new works that reimagine the artist’s early memories of pastoral England through the kitschifying lens of children’s book illustrations.

These pieces have been united with earlier paintings dating back to 2001, resulting in an overall suite of 32 paintings and 23 drawings that reveal Brown’s longstanding fascination with the landscape genre. Fittingly, then, they fill the airy pavilion of Serpentine South in London’s Kensington Gardens, a museum and park to which Brown returned throughout her formative student years.

Into the Wilderness

The central motif of the new “nature walk” paintings in “Cecily Brown: Picture Making” is that of a log fallen over a stream. It is no surprise to learn that this cutesy, somewhat contrived image was borrowed not from real life but from the illustration on a jigsaw puzzle. Brown reworks the composition repeatedly with her trademark exuberance, distorting it into a swarming mass of painterly gestures across a variety of palettes and scales. As the degree of description and points of emphasis shift, Brown indeed lays bare the artist’s part to play in the act of “picture making.”

These surprising slippages between abstraction and figuration have long been central to the artist’s work, which helped ignite a revival of painting at the start of this century. The fluidity of her vigorous brushwork invites active viewing by taking on new meaning in the eye of the beholder. As we roam over the canvas, it is impossible not to wonder if the traces of narrative we cling to are little more than the projections of cloud watching.

“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,” Brown said of this “feeling of trying to grasp” onto something in the exhibition guide. She has also described painting as an “in-between, surrogate world,” a space where we are free to hash out and try on interpretations.

Among many themes to which Brown always returns is that of the charged, erotic encounter. The giddy fun of entwined bodies amid the wilderness of (2003–04) is hard to deny, and it surely borrows its sensual excesses from Rococo painting, one of many art historical nods that litter Brown’s work. She takes the picture and introduces chaos, muddying the borders between flesh and foliage.

“I love the idea of the very romantic river or lake,” Brown teased. “And the follies—so many people must have fooled around in them.”

Newer works conceived for this exhibition see the artist take on vintage British children’s books as references, including the works of Beatrix Potter, the Ladybird books, and Kathleen Hale‘s . The resulting ink drawings are charming, of course. But when animals are anthropomorphized—a signature of Brown’s style since she rose to fame for her frolicking bunnies in the late 1990s—a menacing threat never lurks far below the surface.

Overall, the works on display are a mixed bag. A painting like (2023–24) risks overwhelming and losing the viewer, who is offered little legible structure to anchor themselves within a particularly monumental canvas. Such messy choreographies of gesture work better in a more focused work like (2004), a blur or leaves and branches that mimics the true disorganization of nature. (2024), an aerial view of the gallery against an inexplicably lurid yellow ground can only have been hastily assembled for the occasion.

A Homecoming

Having lived in New York for over three decades, Brown is undoubtedly better known internationally than in the U.K., despite being one of the highest-selling living female artists. When she made the jump across the pond in the mid-1990s, London was ruled by the YBAs, who were too easily able to monopolize attention with their intentionally outrageous sculpture and installation-based practices. If an old guard of London painters like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon had served as inspiration, Brown was born a generation or two too late to join their ranks. Instead, she felt alienated from her peers.

Since leaving, Brown has not looked back. Some of her more flashy museum moments in recent years have included an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, a career-spanning retrospective that toured the Dallas Museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia last year, and several solo shows in Italy and Germany. In the U.K., she has enjoyed only a smattering of regional exhibitions, including at Modern Art Oxford in 2005, Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery in 2017, and Blenheim Palace in 2020. Her London debut at Serpentine South has been met with just a handful of reviews—crickets compared to the fanfare that met David Hockney‘s opening at the nearby Serpentine North just weeks earlier.

If this homecoming is not quiet as triumphant as you’d expect, it may yet be a landmark moment for the U.K.’s belated recognition of Brown.