The Serpentine Gave Both Galleries to Landscape, and the Park Is the Frame

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 30, 2026 | 3 MIN READ The Serpentine Gave Both Galleries to Landscape, and the Park Is the Frame At a Glance Cross London for the pairing — the Serpentine has turned both its galleries over to landscape painting at once, and the park between them is the real frame. The walk to Serpentine South goes through Kensington Gardens, past the trimmed lawns and the orderly flowerbeds. Then the door opens onto a room of paintings of exactly that. Cecily Brown’s “Picture Making” (Serpentine South, to 6 September) is hung with new work she made in direct response to this park, the same lawns and beds she just walked through, put through a blender. Rod Mengham caught it in Apollo: the gardens offer “a time-honoured model of carefully curated nature that Brown’s paintings thrust into a centrifuge.” A five-minute walk across the Serpentine Bridge, the other gallery has done the same thing with a different landscape: David Hockney’s “A Year in Normandie” (Serpentine North, to 23 August). Two of the most-watched painters alive, both showing landscape, fifty paces apart, free to walk into. That is not an accident of scheduling. The institution made a bet on painting this summer, and it is worth a deliberate trip to read it in one go. Why the Serpentine put landscape in both galleries at once What makes this a pairing and not two listings is the park doing the framing. In most shows the frame is the wall, the molding, the white cube holding the picture at arm’s length. Here the frame is the window and the door. Brown’s painted Kensington Gardens hang inside the actual Kensington Gardens, so the painting and its subject are separated by one pane of glass. Walk out, and the real park corrects the eye; walk back in, and Brown’s centrifuged version overrides it again. The room is arguing with the landscape outside it, in real time, and that argument is the show. The frame here isn’t the wall. It’s the window. Critics will tell you whether the brushwork holds. What a painter notices first is the siting: someone understood that hanging these particular paintings in this particular building turns the whole of Kensington Gardens into the vitrine. Two ways to get a park onto a surface Across the bridge, Hockney is the counter-argument. Where Brown loads wet oil until the park dissolves into bodies and weather, Hockney wraps the room in light that comes from behind the image. The Wallpaper review put the scale plainly: “a panoramic frieze of more than 100 iPad paintings that Hockney created during lockdown in 2020, documenting the changing daily view from his former studio in Normandy.” Ninety metres of screen-bright marks, scaled up off a tablet, alongside ten new works he made in late 2025 at 88. So the thread is one subject, landscape, reached two opposite ways. Brown’s surface is physical, slow, mixed in front of the canvas. Hockney’s is luminous, fast, born backlit on glass and only later made big. Seeing them within five minutes of each other is the closest t