Friday 13 January 2012

Glenn Brown "Anaesthesia" 2001 Oil on panel 41.5 x 32.6 in.

4 comments:

  1. what a brilliant take-off. how did you make the Landseer connection?

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  2. Tate Liverpool - E-flux
    Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Auerbach, Dalí, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer. Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque and heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat.

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  3. Glenn Brown paintings By Nicholas James:
    The images are worked on through photoshop manipulation, the dematerialised images are then painstakingly transcribed and amended into an immaculate surface of liquid brushwork. Linear patterns swirl with crevices of flesh and darkness. There is a repellent energy in the statements of crepulous deterioration. In a great panel, Spearmint Rhino 2009, the body of a dead sheep steams with a fetid aura, its woollen coat morphing from tufts of fresh pink/white to patches of lurid green and brown. The dirge to mortality is particularly nightmarish in Nausea 2008. The painting references Velàsquez’ intimidating Pope Innocent X (1650), with an upended figure falling to the void, its garments spreading in soft white trails cut with crimson stains. De Baser 2008 explodes a cloud of flowers, their sickly swirls flowing into a triffid-like vapour. The shaped panel ‘Christ Returns to the Womb’ 2009 transforms Van Gogh’s Pietà to an ethereal blue shroud, the figures fuse like melted plastic and a blackened area draws the senses to a flume-like vortex. Brown probes the relics of culture in a searing critical process, with no room, no escape route anymore to evade the disturbance of his original creations.

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