Glenn Brown. Art Edition No. 13-112. 'Sizewell A'

For the Love of Paint
The transformative art of Glenn Brown
The main spirit that runs through Glenn Brown’s work is transformation. The motif may come from old master paintings, the color scheme from modernist ones, the mood might be set by a title that quotes from a pop song. Brown became famous (and sometimes infamous) for his unabashedly appropriative work in the early 1990s, a golden era for young British art. He rendered the thick brushstrokes of expressionist painters like Frank Auerbach or Karel Appel almost photo-realistically, carefully modeling their dashing gestures with a fine brush until his smooth surfaces deceived the viewer’s eye. Taking space fantasies from science-fiction paperbacks, he made epic history paintings out of tiny book illustrations. Brown turned to the old masters, updating their historical models with a contemporary understanding of paint’s materiality and a barbed sense of color.
Following the artist’s development through the decades, we find his engagement with the medium deepening and branching out. Brown invents his own brushstrokes that take over the picture’s subject, unsettling viewers by their sickly hues. When he starts making sculptures from paint, he absurdly layers brushstrokes on top of each other until they become three-dimensional figures, sometimes growing from bases of historical bronze statuettes. Then he arranges his works in installations as an interplay of different media, or exhibits them in the collection of an art museum in a dialogue between his own paintings and the works that inspired them. In the mid-2010s, Brown stopped painting altogether to explore the medium of drawing, often creating work that reacts to vintage wooden frames he is collecting. Upon his return to painting, there is a newfound freedom of lines dancing and mingling, colors radiating from the core of Janus-like superimpositions of two counteracting motifs.