Cecily Brown made her first UK institutional solo show in twenty years for Serpentine South, painting new work directly out of the Kensington Gardens setting around it.
Cecily Brown showed new paintings made for the site at Serpentine South Gallery in Kensington Gardens from Friday 27 March to Sunday 6 September 2026. It was her first major solo presentation at a UK institution in more than twenty years.
Brown was born in London in 1969, the daughter of the novelist Shena Mackay and the art critic David Sylvester. She trained at Epsom School of Art, Morley College and the Slade, taking a first-class degree in 1993.
She moved to New York the next year. Her first show there, six paintings of amorous, brightly coloured rabbits at Deitch Projects in 1997, was bought in full by Charles Saatchi. Her gestural style draws on Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon as much as on Rubens and Goya.
Her previous major UK institutional show was at Modern Art Oxford in 2005. The new paintings returned to memories of the English landscape and the illustrated children’s books that shaped her before she left.
She has called Kensington Gardens personally significant. The new works hung beside paintings from 2001 onwards and recent monotypes and drawings, with her motifs of amorous couples and woodland scenes.