Glenn Brown
British Artist
Hexham, Northumberland, UK
Summary of Glenn Brown
Brown's work reveals a career-spanning preoccupation with the practice of appropriation. Challenging the time-honoured maxim that the best art has to be truly original, Brown looked to ways in which he might reimagine the history of art and culture - references to works from the canon sit comfortably next to more popular, more contemporary, sources - and he turned to the "regressive" art of painting to make his own mark. Not simply content with aping original works, Brown preferred to alter audience perceptions by drawing on "copies from copies" - usually as viewed second hand through a computer screen. Intrigued with the idea of surfaces, his "flat", often garish, paintings speak to the vernacular of hyperrealism. In the latter part of his career he has turned away from painting to explore the possibilities of drawing and sculpture though thematically he has remained consistent in his commitment to the practices of appropriation and intertextual commentary.
Accomplishments
- Whereas the tendency amongst those engaged in the practice of appropriation was to deconstruct and/or to parody an existing image or set of images, Brown's work tended to be more benign. His artistic concerns lay fundamentally with painterly form and how he might call on the history of art to pursue his interest in addressing the philosophical puzzle of artistic authenticity.
- Emerging from the late-twentieth-century environment that treated painting with mistrust, Brown developed a special interest in raised impasto brushwork. He sought to fetishize expressionistic brushwork, such as that which characterized the work of the School of London, by flattening the tactile surfaces through finely applied brushwork.
- Brown's paintings were often characterized by their penchant for sluicing distortion. His preference for glossy polished surfaces and discordant color arrangements, meanwhile, saw him linked with the unnaturalistic Mannerist tradition in painting. Brown's synthetic color schemes also represented the artist's attempts to produce sculptures made of brush strokes.
- In his later works, Brown moved away from (while not abandoning) his cherished derivative style to pursue a more personal take on the theme of the grotesque and decay. These works, which adopt a looser, more expansive approach, achieve their unsettling aura through abrasive color arrangements that effectively obliterate any reference to other sources.
Progression of Art
The Day the World Turned Auerbach
All is not as it seems in this tortured portrait of a man; his face dissolved into a sea of molten blue and green brushwork. What appear to be swipes, streaks and raised smears of greasy oil paint, applied with Frank Auerbach's trademark ferocity, is revealed, on closer inspection, to be a mirror-flat copy. Taking artistic liberties with Auerbach's original, the colours in Brown's reworked painting have been heightened to take on a hyperrealistic digital glow that lends the image an added aura that verges on the grotesque and monstrous. Though it is possible to read the image on its own terms, with this image, Brown - who acknowledges the original painting in his title - confronts his audience and asks them to question their assumptions about fine art and how it is (or has been) judged according to its degree of originality.
While studying at Goldsmiths College of Art, Brown became aware of the fact that painting (and expressionism especially) was considered passé. Brown duly developed a new method of painting that re-worked existing pieces. Viewing the original canvas through his computer screen and/or books, Brown developed what he called a "healthy cynicism about what it is to look at the world [and] to be in a modern world surrounded by images". Responding to charges of plagiarism, Brown was quick to point out that the practice of artists replicating each other's work could be traced back through the history of art. That having been said, Brown's more flagrant act of copying (from existing copies) sits easily within the penchant for appropriation that became one of the signifiers of a decidedly playful and self-conscious postmodern art.
Oil on canvas - Private Collection
The Loves of Shepherds (After Doublestar by Tony Roberts)
Brown made a series of controversial paintings during the 1990s and early 2000s based on retro science fiction illustrations by Chris Foss, John Martin, and Antony Roberts. The original 1970s images were small in scale; designed to illustrate book covers. Copying from a computer copy once more, Brown distorted and reproduced the illustrations as vast expanded versions of the originals, bringing in areas of detail alongside expansive space vistas. In The Loves of Shepherds, based on Roberts's original illustration, a fantastical, almost operatic, vision opens out before us, where a floating space station veers towards a pulsing blue orb.
Though Brown stood accused of plagiarism - not least by Roberts who took legal action against him - several figures within the art establishment, including Sir Nicholas Serota, rallied behind Brown on grounds that the history of art was comfortable with this type of practice. For his part, Brown was keen to emphasize his input on the new work(s): "The colours are altered, the cities were redrawn and I was always inventing things to increase their intensity right from the start".
In an attempt to raise the artistic status of these images through microscopic areas of detail, dramatic, Mannerist foreshortening, and digitised colouring, Brown maximizes the theatricality of the image: "Art is theater and theater isn't real life," he observed, "it's an exaggeration of real life; it's what makes people engage with something". By appropriating images from 1970s "pulp" literature, the image might qualify as kitsch in respect of the fact that it tests the boundaries of fine art and popular taste.
Oil on canvas - Collection Nouvion-Rey
Hunky Dory
A hunched male figure glowers, his arms crossed in defiance. The blue aura that drenches the artwork imbues him (it) with a melodramatic, perhaps menacing, quality. Animated brushstrokes seem to swirl and twist while directional light falls in from the left, lending the figure a sculptural-like presence.
Brown produced this portrait in a move away from his style of direct appropriation. Here we see a more personal language start to surface, and while we are not now able to discern any direct points of intertextual reference, an austere compositional distance between sitter (fictitious in this instance) and artist emerges that recalls the formal preferences of the Dutch Master painting. Yet, in keeping with all Brown's previous work, the apparent painterly surface amounts to a deception; loose brushwork is instead rendered in a meticulous photoreal manner so what appears spontaneous is in fact a labour-intensive process.
There is also the synthetic aura to contemplate. It speaks very much of the digital age and invites us to consider the impact screens and printed matter have had on the way we experience contemporary art, and, indeed, modern life in general. The title of this work is borrowed from a David Bowie album, another playing act of borrowing (from one of the artist's personal idols).
Brown is interested in the power of dissonance, between what we perceive initially, and what we uncover on closer inspection. There is a certain irony in the fact that the pronounced digital influences on his work ask that it be experienced first-hand rather than through reproduction. As Brown explains, "The paintings do not photograph terribly well, which is the point really, because they have such flat, precise and sheer surfaces. You really need to see that". Brown also seeks to create feelings of disquiet, calling himself "the Stilton cheese of painting" because he believes spectators "like to be irritated", and "because it's fun" to irritate people through art. Tate Gallery writes that this work (and others like it) "question the genre of portraiture, revealing the inaccuracies of capturing real people through the illusory device of painting".
Oil on canvas
Deep Throat
A tangled tornado of brushstrokes whirl and merge, loosely forming the shape of shoulders, neck and head. But against its sky-blue backdrop, this could just as easily be a strange, gnarling tree growing upwards from the ground into an angry mass of uncontained energy. Brushstrokes seem to almost take on three-dimensional form, creating the impression of a solid, sculptural mass, but they are in fact painted with photoreal accuracy, once more lending them a synthetic, digital quality. The slippery, watery quality of the brushstrokes also reveal that image has most likely been filtered through a computer screen, while Brown's colour scheme expands into the artificial greens and blues of some synthetic, imaginary cyberspace. "It's a good example of a painting that appears to be a painting of a sculpture, but a sculpture made of brush marks," said Brown.
This work typifies Brown's mid-career phase. He had abandoned his earlier commitment to straight-forward appropriation in favor of a more expressive, more abstract style. It is true that he based many of his subjects on existing works, but now he brought a freer feel for interpretation to his work. For instance, this work began as a clump of trees borrowed from a Chaim Soutine painting to which he added "the myth of the Green Man, the natural spirit of nature [and] also with the unpleasant ... darker side of nature".
Conveying a sense that a head could double as a tree lends the work a surrealistic quality. For Brown, however, the work owed more to the legacy of Art Brut (or Outsider Art), a term coined in the mid-twentieth century by Jean Dubuffet that describe the art work of the insane, prisoners, children and primitive artists, that were raw and brutish in their application.
Brown was also intoxicated with the idea that "the entire world was made of paint" and that "every person in the world was made of paint". That idea was not as outlandish as it seems once Brown described it as "a metaphor for everything in the world being made of other people's ideas" and that the artist cannot "look at anything without the knowledge that other people have looked at it and thought about it" already.
Oil on canvas - Private Collection
Burlesque
A pile of rotting green fruit tumbles over a tabletop while the ominous looking sky threatens a severe storm. Brown brings to his humble still life a palpable sense of foreboding in the darkening, impressionistic sky which is contrasted with the sharply focussed still life aspect. Art critic Martin Herbert described the work in fact as "a still life-in landscape of fetid viridian sacks or vegetation, marooned in [a] green world".
Brown made this painting having become established as a photorealist interpreter of found sources. The motif for this painting is based on a still life by Gustav Courbet, who similarly invested dramatic lighting and subtle symbolism into his rolling tabletop studies. Brown makes reference both to Courbet, and to the whole, centuries old, history of still life painting, bringing it up to date with strange, synthetic lighting and an unsettling aura. Brown also merges the still life with the striking landscape lending the work a greater sense of generic ambiguity.
As much as the historical references are important to Brown, he stated that this work can be read as a powerful statement on its own terms: "I want people to think of them [the apples] as a reclining nude, to walk around the landscape, to look at the rather repellent green colour, to wonder whether it's sunset or sunrise and why this strange, greenish-white yellow light is coming down from nowhere and shining on this little event which is happening". One can of course admire the painting on its own terms for Brown's ability to heighten the quality of decay through his skilful rendering of the uneasy, sickly colored fruit.
Oil on canvas - Collection the artist
Nausea
In this ghoulish, haunting portrait, a trembling, upturned figure emerges from the darkness like a spectre from the deep. Blue hands, a blackened face and a floating, groundless form lend the subject a grisly, supernatural quality, while aqueous brushstrokes fall over their form like molten metal. Brown paints this subject in his trademark photorealist style, rendering apparent painterly marks with careful precision.
Like many of his paintings, the subject of this work is figurative and references a single historical artwork. In this case, however, the work references two works: Diego Velasquez's Portrait of Innocent X, (1650) and Francis Bacon's famous "screaming pope" version of Velazquez's portrait, Head VI, (1949). Brown pays homage to Bacon's copy but moves beyond it at the same time: "I was trying to figure out a way to use the Velazquez to make it my own. By taking away the head and turning it upside down, it's not about the Pope any longer. And also it's not about the Francis Bacon painting, because by taking away the head, the thing that made the Francis Bacon painting great isn't there anymore".
Lending the subject a sense of weightlessness was important to Brown. He achieved this by isolating a detail from the original(s), such as the blue hands, and rotating them. This action also abstracts the original meaning, allowing us to read it in terms of visual attributes such as color, atmosphere and depth, leaving the painting open to fresh interpretations. "Reading a painting of mine is a very subjective thing," said Brown, "it all depends on what historical baggage the viewer has at their disposal...".
Oil on panel
Drawing 8 (After Tiepolo)
A swirling mass of energy comes together in this detailed drawing. It conveys the brewing tension of a storm gathering pace. Figurative fragments emerge from the dust, kicking outwards with desperation before dissolving into the centre. As referenced in the title, this work was made in response to the loose, fluid drawings of 18th century Venetian painter Tiepolo, whose complex figurative arrangements and linear strands Brown both echoes and abstracts.
This work represents a mature phase in Brown's practice, moving beyond painting into the language of drawing; a medium that he has found to allow for more expressive, immediate forms of mark making. Much of his drawing has been made with reference to cartoons (which were originally made as studies for paintings) from the Italian Renaissance. Brown has said of the great Italian Masters, "I love the fluidity of their line. It's that which I'm trying to borrow especially. The sense of movement".
As well as bringing in references to the Renaissance, as with his earlier paintings, Brown also infuses his drawings with a more contemporary style of mark making, with crisp, clean lines lifted from a variety of sources, forming the same visual "mash-up" as his paintings. He writes, "I borrow from anything, whether it's Disney or Rembrandt or Rubens. I think there are always lessons to be learned".
Brown also carefully integrates the old-fashioned frame here into a vital component of the art, giving it the revered quality of a museum relic. Blending together classical art references with a cartoonish, digital style in this way brings Brown's drawing practice in line with the work of a range of contemporary artists including Inka Essenhigh and Julie Mehretu.
Indian ink and watercolour on paper
Let me ferry you out to sea To see who you could have been When the time comes to row back in You'll be in the place you should have been
A bronze, female figure crouches in a classical pose while balancing a teeming mass of congealed colored paint strands over her right shoulder. The clean simplicity of the bronze sculpture is undercut with this messy, riotous burst of color, injecting an emblem of the past with the shock of the new. Brown's careful placing of the painterly matter here shifts the model's once relaxed pose into an act of defence as she appears to shield herself from an unwanted gaze or even an unexpected attack.
Sculptural works are a recent departure for Brown (notwithstanding the fact that his admiration for Frank Auerbach was founded on his sculptural-like application of paint) allowing him to expand the postmodern, appropriated language of his earlier works into three dimensions. Within his paintings Brown often invested in a sense of form and volume through dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting that seems to recede into, rather than expand outwards from, the picture plane. In sculpture, however, he is able to explore the frenetic layers of same-size brushstrokes that define his oeuvre, but they are now hovering in tactile, rather than imagined, space.
Re-styling a found object with an almost violent interruption, Brown echoes the 'Detournements' of Asger Jorn, but the plastic, synthetic colors in Brown's sculpture bring it into the glaring, vivid light of the 21st century. Brown's intervention also opens the sculpture up into a more imaginative, complex narrative, particularly when given such a long, lyrical title. Taking an old statue and changing its identity through an act of intervention is also a common trope with Scottish artist Jonathan Owen, who carves into the object's original form and transforms it into a surreal, uncanny new motif.
Oil paint and acrylic on bronze
Biography of Glenn Brown
Childhood
Glenn Brown was born in 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland, in the north of England. He has described the importance of religious iconography to his early visual development - "It's what surrounded me when I was growing up" he said - and particularly the grandiose, often violently shocking, subject matter. But as Brown's artistic interests developed into adolescence, it was the self-aware language of postmodernism that attracted him. Speaking of artists like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Richard Prince, he picked up on the "emotional detachment, the cool gaze of the detached artist" and the fact that the audience "never quite know what [the artists are] thinking. It's about the way technology has detached us from the direct relationship with the real world" he concluded.
Early Training and Work
Brown began his formal training with a Foundation Course at Norwich School of Art & Design, before earning his BA in Fine Art from Bath School of Art. In the early 1990s he moved to London to study at Goldsmith's College of Art, not long after key members of the Young British Artists (YBA) group, including Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, had graduated from the college; "I was very aware of them and what they had done", he recalled. Like his predecessors, Brown was taught by the influential tutor Michael Craig-Martin, now world famous for having steered the YBAs towards the path of international success. Craig-Martin's focus as a teacher was less on specific skills and more on developing a certain way of thinking about art, as Brown put it, "Painting wasn't taught. Philosophy was taught. I realised you couldn't do anything original - because if you did something that had not been done before, it would not be understandable".
Brown took up the challenge of "being original" by devoting his energies to painting; a medium that seemed on the brink of death in the 1990s: "That always felt very much an issue when I was at college. What you paint, how you paint, painting is dead, this is the last dying throes of painting" Brown recalled. The postmodern language of appropriation, as practiced by the likes of the Pictures Generation made a special impact on him. Inspired by the writings of the French philosopher Roland Barthes, the Pictures Generation, named after a 1977 exhibition in at the Artist's Space in New York, was a loose-knit of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who interrogated (amongst other things) by way of image deconstruction, the idea of mass consumerism and artistic originality.
One of the first paintings Brown made while still at Goldsmiths was Atom Age Vampire in 1991, one of many pieces that copied the work of British Expressionist Frank Auerbach. Drawing on digital reproductions of the original paintings, Brown reduced the raised surface of the Auerbach originals, transforming them into glossy, flattened imitations. Gradually, the work of other painters was filtered through Brown's digital lens, including Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, and Chaim Soutine. Brown insisted that his fascination with expressionist art was sincere - "I want to be Soutine, I want to be de Kooning, slashing away at the canvas" - but expressionism had been met with scorn by the postmodernists: "I fetishize the brush mark, and treat them like objects to be gazed at in awe [but eventually only] to be mocked" Brown confessed.
Following graduation, Brown followed the lead of many of his peers when he set up studio in the neglected area of Shoreditch; an area of East London where abandoned factories, squats and run-down shops were occupied by aspiring artists and gallerists. Brown's inclusion in exhibitions promoted under the banner of YBA, including the iconic Sensation at London's Royal Academy in 1997, tied him to that movement, though the artist himself had sought to put some space between himself and the YBAs. In Brown's view, his determination to paint distanced him from the installation-heavy art of the most prominent YBAs, namely Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, and Jake and Dinos Chapman. Yet he became part of a painterly component of the movement that embraced artists including Gary Hume, Fiona Rae, Jenny Saville, and Chris Ofili all of whom adopted new conceptual approaches to "old fashioned" art of painting.
Mature Period
In the mid-1990s, Brown, intent on "playing" with found images through which he could produce the "sense of the gothic", created a series of paintings based on science fiction illustrations from the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on the kitsch book-cover art by the likes of Antony Roberts and Chris Foss, Brown reproduced their illustrations on a sublime scale. But rather than simply copy the original works, Brown shifted the image to include panoramic vistas with areas of painstakingly rendered, photorealistic, detail. Nevertheless, Roberts had been so incensed by Brown's paintings he commenced legal proceedings against him. The case was settled out of court, though the fallout brought on a raft of personal issues for Brown who recalled, "[the legal battle] was not amusing at the time. For two years afterwards it was very miserable. It was an extraordinarily expensive thing. I had just bought a house and I nearly lost it because of it."
Brown's art brought him widespread recognition following his Turner Prize nomination in 2000. Not all the attention he received was positive however. Some took offence at his methods with The Times newspaper accusing him of blatant plagiarism. Leaping to Brown's defence, Chairman of the Turner Prize, Sir Nicholas Serota argued vehemently for the legitimacy of Brown's practice: "I would argue that it's not a piece of plagiarism [...] Brown has frequently used the work of other artists in developing his own work, but that is true of Picasso, who borrowed from Rembrandt [...] this is not new. Glenn Brown is a remarkable painter and artist [...] he takes the image, he transforms it [it is] completely different".
Late Period
Moving into the new millennium, Brown's practice started to move in less derivative, directions. His new phase was, in part, a reaction to a review written by Jonathan Jones of The Guardian. As Brown explained: "In 2000 I did a show and he wrote that I was holding something back. He said, 'There needs to be a larger Glenn.' And he was right. So, I became more, in the word he used in the review, 'carnivalesque'". Brown cited the painting International Velvet (2004), a piece inspired by Georg Baselitz, as the moment when his art truly "came of age". The original reference to Baselitz was in the end all-but abandoned in a creative process that would effectively obliterate any reference to Baselitz's original(s).
The decadent language of the grotesque has become most pronounced in Brown's more recent, larger-scale paintings, which combine the precision of his earlier works with a looser, freer handling of paint. His subject matter embraces the extremes, including grossly distorted figuration, religious references and living things on the brink of decay, painted in deliberately jarring, unsettling colors, in a language influenced by the extremities of Mannerism. Direct references to art historical sources are often more oblique, allowing Brown to stake a greater claim on authenticity. The later paintings also open up room for expanded interpretations, as Brown himself explained, "... it is better to encourage the viewer to do as much work as possible. Leave a few gaps and the human brain quickly tries to fill them, and make sense of what it sees".
Reflecting recently on the room for personal growth and development Brown commented, "[some] artists ... as they get older ... get more energetic and more complex and richer in the way they ... work. And you want to be one of those artists". Latterly embracing drawing and sculpture, Brown has expanded his repertoire, delving into the language of art history and its disturbing relationship with the human psyche. Brown was awarded a CBE for his services to the arts, while he continues to work in a studio in the Shoreditch area of London.
The Legacy of Glenn Brown
The legacy of appropriation, so effectively exploited by Brown through the "moribund" medium of painting, continues to exert its influence over a number of contemporary artists. British artist Neil Gall's meticulous, precise language of drawing, painting, and sculpture appropriates discarded ephemera such as postcards and litter, to produce excessive works of Baroque (over) indulgence. Like Brown, his detailed surfaces and clashing colour combinations play with the borders between beauty and kitsch. Likewise, William Daniels has created photorealist paintings construed of "visual rubble" to create fantastical realities in which torn scraps of paper become charging knights and crumpled foil forms kaleidoscopic patterns of color and light. Dexter Dalwood, meanwhile, creates complex narratives out of pre-existing, printed material through a process of re-painting. Mirroring the same language of quotation as Brown, familiar fragments of buildings, interiors and landscapes are torn from magazine pages and re-painted in an attempt to recreate the prismatic experience of living in the 21st century.