A wacky take on the 18th century

Philadelphia-born Karen Kilimnik has spent a decade moving from "scatter art" (scattered items held together with explanatory titles) and scatty drawings (held together with amusing handwriting) to painting.

Her journey has been marked by theatricality - such as putting small, roughly painted pictures in a Venetian palazzo titivated with flowers and feathers deliberately to fuddle the boundary between setting and work.

Kilimnik's solo exhibition at the Serpentine continues this. Taken as a whole, it is a sort of rapid-fire 18th-century conversation piece.

The vividly coloured rooms, all with an eye-level line of canvases, are separated by swagged velvet curtains.

Then, Kilimnik makes each room a mise-en-scËne. The first room's floor is scattered with a glass ball, five forks in a wonky star, candles and playing cards.

The second boasts riding tack and boots and, at one end, a fake-timbered snug with cast-iron fireplace and an old table.

In the third, a walk-in folly of three connecting roomlets with fancy architraves, fireplaces and chandeliers keeps up the amiable chat about 18th-century houses and folie de grandeur.

Round the walls, Kilimnik's paintings show fast strokes that lack much directional or other discipline, so that each picture is almost a theatrical gesture, part of a huge spoof collection in a gigantic doll's house. Shadows are blobbed on, white zigzags could be lightning or branches.

Her subjects range from quite amusing rip-offs of other, often identifiable, paintings, to quirky dogs or deer; horses with My Little Pony manes; moody woods whose daubs of green and brown conjure an impressionistic forest; and portraits.

In the handful of these that are done with greater care (in that the paint strokes contribute to the form of the face), she catches a devil of a likeness.