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.
The Serpentine show draws on over two decades of painting, threading new canvases alongside works from 2001 in an attempt to trace the evolution of her process-led practice. Among the most compelling are the Nature Walk paintings — dense, flickering compositions that carry a genuine feeling for the natural world. Human forms entangle with woodland, bird boxes appear like quiet domestic intrusions, and the English landscape becomes something simultaneously tender and faintly strange.
The works hum with the sensation of half-remembered childhood — a walk in the park suffused with wonder rather than dread, though Brown, being Brown, ensures the two are never entirely separable. What strikes one is how often Brown conveys no sense of a predetermined destination— and the work is so unforced, that the results feel less like acts of composition than of discovery. Her professed love for painting is not rhetorical. It is there in the work, embedded in every layer, and it rewards the viewer accordingly: come back a second time, look again more slowly, and the paintings yield things you simply did not see before. That quality of inexhaustible return is rarer than it sounds.
One thinks, irresistibly, of Paula Rego — another painter who understood that the imagery of children's illustration could be weaponised to carry far darker cargo. Brown has spoken of her deep affection for children's book illustration, the sinister undercurrents of nursery rhymes, the shadows lurking beneath pastoral sweetness. Her drawings and monotypes in this show are a genuine delight. Particularly so is Untitled (from Three Kittens in a Boat), inspired by Geraldine Robinson's early twentieth-century children's book — so utterly, disarmingly sweet that one almost forgets Brown's capacity for the erotic and the violent. Almost. In her Serpentine interview she notes that fragments of her signature bunny work persist throughout everything she makes — ghosts in the machinery of every canvas — and that continuity, once you begin to look for it, is everywhere.
Yet one must be honest about the exhibition's failures. The hanging in the main room is ill-judged — several paintings placed so high as to be not exactly missable, but robbed of the intimacy they demand and stranded above the sight line. The show also lacks coherent direction; one drifts rather than journeys through it, which does Brown's rigorous practice no favours.
She lives in New York. But her work — rooted in English landscape memory, in Kensington Gardens, the Thames, the long shadow of the National Gallery — deserves to be celebrated here more often. This exhibition, frustrations and all, makes the case.
Cecily Brown: Picture Making is at Serpentine South until 6 September
