Hoi Polloi : The Brown Collection, Marylebone, London

The Brown Collection is pleased to present Hoi Polloi, an exhibition curated by British artist Glenn Brown. Hoi Polloi is derived from the Greek for ‘the people’, or the many, most often used as an insult for the “great unwashed masses”. The exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures from the sixteenth century to the present. It explores how artists have represented, resisted, or reimagined the ordinary man through the lens of the spiritual. From the grandeur of the Baroque line to fractured modern visions, Hoi Polloi considers the human form as both spectacle and subject, inviting viewers to encounter ‘the people’ in ways that are at once striking, intimate, and unsettling.

Organised across four floors, the exhibition unfolds thematically: The Ecstatic Mark, The Spiritual Human/Portrait, and The Sublime Body/Flesh. The Ecstatic Mark anchors the show, presenting works charged with energy, emotion, and desire, from Annie French’s confetti-like marks to Roger Hilton’s bold gestures, Hendrick Goltzius’s precise engravings, and Carmen Dionyse’s textured clay surfaces.

Alongside major figures such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Bernardo Strozzi, Austin Osman Spare, Anya Gallaccio, and Gillian Wearing, the exhibition highlights underrepresented artists, including Gertrude Hermes, Carmen Dionyse, Ann Churchill, Annie French, and Boris Petrovich Sveshnikov.

By combining historic and contemporary material, Hoi Polloi celebrates the vitality of artistic mark-making in its many forms. From Baroque brushstrokes to the psychological and spiritual intensity of modern drawing, the exhibition affirms the ecstatic mark as a force that transcends time, shaping how artists give form to people or the masses and their own experiences.