It is thus that Glenn Brown’s art reveals the subjective force of his translations of reproductions of works by earlier masters, his atomization of painting, and the inexhaustible inventiveness of his practice, which appropriates the styles and colours of drawings and classical paintings. This profusion of tactile matter dialogues with the artist’s canvases which, although entirely smooth, likewise give the impression of an interplay of textures and feverish visual masses. One such reproduction, showing Field with Irises near Arles (of which the original painted by Van Gogh in 1888 can be seen in our other exhibition), provided the palette of Glenn Brown’s 2016 sculpture The Flowers of Arles.
The three new sculptures created by the artist for the exhibition Suffer Well may be read as 3D translations of the brushmarks of Frank Auerbach and of the misleading and dated colours of reproductions of works by Vincent van Gogh. These latter deploy brush strokes that have been liberated from the flat surface of his paintings and which now constitute condensed agglomerates in a medley of hues laid down on top of a base of bronze. His drawings also maintain a thematic and visceral relationship with his paintings and sculptures. Since 2013 Glenn Brown has pursued drawing as an autonomous means of artistic expression, in graphic works whose surfaces are covered with an ensemble of marks and sinuous lines that interweave and reply to each other. This event marks an important milestone, not only because it has been 16 years since the last retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre was held in France in 2000, but also because the exhibition unites all three media in which Glenn Brown is today active: painting, sculpture and drawing. This summer the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles pays tribute to Glenn Brown with a major retrospective bringing together some thirty works.
While his contemporaries were asking themselves the question “Why bother painting?”, Glenn Brown chose to make the brushmarks of earlier masters, such as Vincent van Gogh, the subject of his paintings. At this epoch painting – and figurative painting even more so – was viewed as the poor relation among the media available to modern art. After completing his MA in 1992 at London’s Goldsmiths College, he struck out against the prevailing artistic current. The British painter and sculptor Glenn Brown is one of the most important and yet often overlooked artists of his generation.
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