Long live Cecily Brown. There. It needed saying before anything else, because the risk with an exhibition as sprawling and occasionally maddening as Picture Making at the Serpentine is that one's irritations obscure the rather magnificent fact of her brilliance. And she is magnificent — not merely critically, but commercially. Brown is among the most expensive living female painters in the world, her canvases commanding prices that would make lesser talents weep. The market, for once, is not wrong.
Born in London in 1969, Brown is the daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay— a pedigree that guarantees nothing in art, but hints at a childhood marinated in the dramatic and the literary — a pedigree that guarantees nothing in art, but hints at a childhood marinated in the dramatic and the literary. She studied at the Slade, briefly flirted with New York on exchange in1992, and never came home. That exile has defined her: she sees England as a tourist now, with a long-distance lover's idealised ache. It gives the work its particular longing.
