Spurning the original works themselves, inferior two-dimensional reproductions sourced from postcards, book illustrations and art-print websites constitute Brown’s inspirational supply. Essentially, Brown gazumps the viewer’s preconceived understanding of art history and pictorial reality.īrown’s incorporation of the flattened aesthetic of mechanically, even digitally, reproduced imagery mirrors the way visual culture is mediated by its proliferation. Passed through a hyperrealist prism these paintings are distorted, skewed and turned upside-down brush marks are obsessively rendered, colours are hyped-up and texture is rendered flat.
However, his paintings are far from mere quotations or straight copies. Denounced for plagiarism during his Turner Prize exhibition in 2000, Brown converses with the notion of appropriation, a concept most notably associated with Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman during the 1980s. Masters from art history act as hosts through which Brown obscures his own creative persona: Fragonard, Dalí, Rembrandt, de Kooning, Kris Appel and Frank Auerbach constitute the mainstay of Brown’s artistic vocabulary. The epitome of postmodern expression in paint, Brown’s practice of ‘painting paint’ is embroiled in a complex negotiation between mechanical/painterly reproduction and authorial detachment. In pushing the original composition, colour palette and brushwork of Head of J.Y.M to the limits, Little Death represents the peak of Brown’s engagement with Auerbach’s 1973 work.īelonging to the generation of artists that emerged from Goldsmiths in the early 1990s, Glenn Brown is renowned for making mutant clones of canonical paintings spanning centuries of art history. In flattening the expressionistic gesture, sculpturally impastoed brushwork is emptied of its machismo drama: the physicality of Auerbach’s paint is evacuated and reduced to a complex surface pattern. As the most realised conception from a series produced in 2000 specifically engaged with Auerbach’s painting, Little Death illustrates Brown’s masterful painterly showmanship via the tonally rich flourishing swirls of paint that immaculately embellish his photographically-smooth trademark surface. Selected for all of Glenn Brown’s major exhibitions to date, Little Death is a remarkably envisaged and highly sophisticated example of the artist’s longstanding dialogue with Frank Auerbach’s 1973 work, Head of J.Y.M.
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