Increasingly removed from art historical references, Brown's practice expanded to include sculpture and installation. In response, the painter adapted his visual language to introduce additional distortion, religious symbolism, and decay.Īccordingly, works like Ohne Titel (2004), which shows a green-faced woman wearing a black hat and a disturbing expression, and Sympathy for the Poor (2003), depicting a distorted figure of Jesus, provoke and unsettle, culminating in a lexicon of the grotesque. Religion and Decayīrown's work veered towards the moribund in the 2000s after a review in The Guardian urged him to stop holding back. The case was eventually settled out of court.

Found Imagesīrown started using found images in the mid-1990s, creating a series of paintings based on science-fiction images and kitsch book-cover art scaled up to show granular detail.Īmongst the plagiarised, science-fiction illustrator Antony Roberts sued the painter for copyright infringement. This painting drew from digital reproductions of British Expressionist Frank Auerbach's distorted portraits, which Brown transformed into flattened imitations.

He was inspired by the Pictures Generation, who interrogated artistic originality by appropriating images.Īmongst Brown's first paintings is Atom Age Vampire (1991), depicting a corpse-like figure looking towards the sky. In the 1990s, at a time when the medium of painting had fallen out of favour, Glenn Brown took up the challenge of making original work. At Goldsmiths, he was taught by Michael Craig-Martin, who had instructed the cohort of the Young British Artists (YBAs).įollowing his graduation, Brown set up a studio in East London and was regularly included in exhibitions along with other YBAs, despite wanting to distance himself from the group's installation-focused practice. Educationīrown attended the Bath School of Art and Design from 1985 to 1988, before completing an MA at Goldsmiths College in London in 1992.

Born in Hexham, England, Brown grew up surrounded by religious iconography, noting its use of grandiosity and violence, which would later return across his paintings.Īs an adolescent, the artist was drawn to the emotional detachment and the self-awareness of postmodernism, as well as the visual language of conceptual painters like Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.

Glenn brown website