About
As time has gone on, I have increasingly detached myself from contemporary art. I still look at a lot, but I am far more drawn to the preceding five hundred years of the history of painting. It seems very short-sighted just to look at the history of the past few years when there is a much longer history to draw on. I don’t really believe in cultural evolution or a cultural progression. I think we just move around on a surface of intellectual debate. The way that Guido Reni described the human condition, which was rather kitsch and overwrought in many ways, informs me more than much contemporary painting ever could.
—Glenn Brown
Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of etchings and sculpture by Glenn Brown.
Brown’s Mannerist impulses produce complex and unsettling images inspired by his recollections of art of different historical eras fused with the culture of the present. In these startling visual hybrids, familiar forms and motifs can be detected, but they are imbued with a grotesque otherworldliness. Best known for his elaborately worked paintings, Brown has taken up the medium of etching to further intensify his engagement with the texture of surfaces and mark making. In doing so, he offers a bold reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century tradition of copying historical subjects as a learning process.
Taking portraits by Urs Graf, Lucien Freud, and Rembrandt as inspiration, Brown scans the images and digitally manipulates them. He overlays a number of the scanned portraits to create composites. The composites are in turn used to produce a series of printing plates. These plates are used in combination to create the final etchings, layers upon layers of black ink. Some etchings comprise up to fifteen different original source images. Using this intricate and time-intensive procedure, Brown collapses many different reproductive processes into single inky, spectral images, as seen in his Layered Portrait (After Lucien Freud), Layered Portrait (After Rembrandt), and Layered Portrait (After Urs Graf) (all 2008). By conflating the source images—and thus copying and erasing them concurrently—Brown creates entirely new portraits or, rather “anti-portraits,” where past and present are accreted into dense palimpsests, at once familiar and alien.
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Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2023
The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
Glenn Brown: From the Inside Out
Novelist Andrew Winer reports on the formal, conceptual, historical, and philosophical perspectives embedded in Glenn Brown’s latest paintings and drawings. The two talked after the opening of the artist’s recent New York exhibition Glenn Brown: We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent.
Glenn Brown: We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent
In conjunction with his exhibition Glenn Brown: We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent at Gagosian in New York, the artist sits down to discuss his new paintings, sculptures, and drawings.
In Conversation
Glenn Brown and Jacky Klein
Glenn Brown speaks with art historian Jacky Klein about working between mediums, his first finished painting of 2021, and the evolution of his artistic voice.
Augurs of Spring
As spring approaches in the Northern Hemisphere, Sydney Stutterheim reflects on the iconography and symbolism of the season in art both past and present.
Visions of the Self: Jenny Saville on Rembrandt
Jenny Saville reveals the process behind her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt’s masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles.
News
Artist Spotlight
Glenn Brown
April 28–May 4, 2021
Mining art history and popular culture, Glenn Brown has created an artistic language that refuses categorization, combining a wide range of periods from art history through reference, appropriation, and precise attention to detail. His mannerist impulses stem from a desire to breathe new life into past images; they are treasuries of raw material, offering countless images, titles, and techniques to be combined and deconstructed, producing complex and sensuous works of art that are resolutely of our time.
Photo: Edgar Laguinia