The Glenn Brown exhibition brings together the largest selection of the works of this highly revered painter of his generation. Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Dalí, Auerbach, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer.
Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque, while heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat. Often placing formal and aesthetic concerns over original subject matter and meaning, details from well-known works are isolated, manipulated, becoming subject matters themselves.
Glenn Brown was born in Hexam in 1966. From 1984 to 1992 he studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education and then at Goldsmith’s College. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000.
Partners:
TATE Liverpool
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
