Cecily Brown and the Question of Time: Why Painting Still Matters

In a culture defined by speed and digital reproduction, painting can seem almost defiant in its insistence on duration. Cecily Brown’s return to London brings that defiance into focus, positioning her work within a broader reflection on time, memory and the continued relevance of paint as a physical, thinking medium.

Brown has long been associated with a mode of figurative abstraction in which bodies and landscapes emerge, dissolve and reappear within dense, energetic surfaces. Her canvases are restless. Brushstrokes collide, smear and accumulate; perspective collapses; figures are glimpsed rather than declared. The act of looking becomes active, even uncertain.

At Serpentine South, new works sit alongside paintings dating back to the early 2000s, allowing viewers to trace the continuity of certain motifs. Lovers entangled in woodland settings, figures half-submerged in watery landscapes, and scenes that hover between pastoral idyll and erotic charge recur across decades. The repetition is not nostalgic. Instead, it suggests a testing of images, as if each return were an attempt to discover how far a motif can be stretched before it fractures.

Cecily Brown, Nature Walk with Paranoia, 2024, Oil on linen, 226.06 x 210.82 cm (89 x 83 in.) © Cecily Brown, 2026. Photo: Genevieve Hanson

Nature, in Brown’s hands, is never merely descriptive. The exhibition draws on the specific context of Kensington Gardens, where the gallery stands, yet the park is less a location than a mental landscape. Brown’s paintings have long blurred the boundary between human bodies and their surroundings. Flesh and foliage merge; limbs echo branches; water swallows contours. The result is an uneasy fusion in which desire and environment are inseparable.

This interplay between image and surface is central to Brown’s practice. She has often described painting as a physical process led by the medium itself. In recent canvases such as Froggy would a-wooing go and Little Miss Muffet, both made in 2024–2025, nursery rhyme references surface only to be disrupted by thick skeins of paint. Small figures inspired by Victorian fairy imagery flicker at the edges of legibility. Narrative, if it exists at all, is thwarted.

Elsewhere, earlier works such as Bacchanal, Couple and Teenage Wildlife foreground the sensuality of paint as substance. Bodies press together, but their outlines are unstable, sometimes indistinguishable from the terrain around them. Brown’s long-standing interest in eroticism is filtered through a painterly language that alternates between revelation and concealment. The surface becomes a site of tension: what is shown is always on the verge of being absorbed back into abstraction.

The exhibition also includes drawings and monotypes that point to the breadth of Brown’s visual references. Children’s literature, particularly the worlds of Beatrix Potter and Kathleen Hale’s Orlando the Marmalade Cat, sits alongside vintage Ladybird illustrations. Animals appear as proxies for human behaviour, echoing the moral ambiguities of fairy tales and cautionary stories. The sweetness of these sources is offset by a darker undercurrent. Innocence is never entirely secure.

Brown’s biography is often framed as a transatlantic story. Born in London in 1969, trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, she moved to New York in 1994 after a formative period at the New York Studio School. The city’s scale and painterly traditions proved decisive. Over three decades, she has developed a practice that converses as much with Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon as with British narrative painting and illustration.

Yet the London exhibition resists simple notions of homecoming. Instead, it situates Brown’s work within a longer history of painting as a site of return and revision. Her repeated engagement with certain compositions — including a recent group of “nature walk” paintings inspired by a jigsaw puzzle image of a fallen log bridging a river — underscores her belief in variation as method. By altering scale, palette and format, she treats painting as an ongoing inquiry rather than a finished statement.

That inquiry feels particularly relevant now. In a cultural moment dominated by digital circulation and instant reproduction, Brown’s canvases insist on physical presence. They demand that viewers stand before them, adjust their focus and allow forms to coalesce over time. Meaning is not delivered; it is negotiated.

The Serpentine’s long-standing commitment to free public access amplifies this dynamic. Situated in a royal park, the gallery operates at the intersection of leisure and contemplation. Brown’s engagement with park life — couples strolling, figures wandering wooded paths — mirrors the rhythms of the setting outside. The boundary between art and environment is porous.

Ultimately, Picture Making is less about illustrating stories than about testing the durability of painting itself. Brown’s surfaces record the gestures of their making; they are documents of time, hesitation and revision. In doing so, they reaffirm painting’s capacity to hold complexity without resolving it.

As debates about the future of the medium continue, Brown’s exhibition suggests that painting’s relevance lies not in novelty but in persistence. By returning to familiar images and allowing them to mutate across years, she aligns herself with a tradition in which repetition becomes a form of thinking. In the layered space between figure and abstraction, between memory and immediacy, painting remains a way of seeing that refuses to disappear.