Glenn Brown

Brown’s mannerist inventiveness derives not so much from a compulsion to break new ground as from a desire to examine and pervert the existing thicknesses of history, to recollect an open-ended mesh of references to painting and cultural history, past and present. In doing so, he creates a carnivalesque world where the rational and the irrational, the abstract and the visceral, the beautiful and the grotesque, the empty and the full are brought together in a vigorous state of play. Nothing in Brown’s paintings is as it initially appears to be. His evocation of memorable images—including Rococo, Mannerist, Expressionist, Surrealist, and sci-fi masterpieces—disturbs because his sophisticated distortions prevent the sources from ever being truly fixed and identified. His heterogeneous titles—Senile Youth, Polichinelle, Deep Throat, The Alabama Song, and so on—echo from popular culture, past and present, adding an element of free association to his perverse and slippery formula.

Beneath the sheer, flat surfaces of Brown’s paintings lurk roiling depths and textures, intricately described yet deprived of mass. In his lurid subjects, history swirls against vapors or in the silent vacuum of outer space. His courtly women and bloated, ectoplasmic figures float and melt in the process of efflorescent growth or decay—morbid reflections on the grand visions and gestures of image making; the tenuous structures of life, death, myth, and cliché; and the textures of the physical world that support them. In Brown’s occasional sculptures—a “still life” comprising a small table encrusted like a well-used palette, or a “portrait” comprised entirely of thick strokes of paint—his fascination with the physical properties of his chosen medium is given ultimate expression as both the subject and object of the work.