Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown paints with one foot in the grave. His mannerist impulses — appropriating Auerbach, Rembrandt, sci-fi illustrators, and the layered gestures of postwar painting — flatten impasto into smooth, illusionistic surfaces. What looks like thick paint is actually thin. What reads as historical is entirely fabricated.

He sources images from the Internet, books, and the detritus of popular culture, distorting them into panoramic apocalypses and close-up studies of flesh. The sculptures accumulate thick oil paint over bronze or found casts. The drawings, begun in earnest in 2013, use ink and acrylic on polyester film to reinterpret Old Master portraits as uncanny, tactile hybrids.

Brown studied at Goldsmiths in the 1980s, when painting was declared dead. His practice is the argument that followed — history as material, surface as seduction, and the accumulated image-bank of our subconscious as the only studio worth working in.