Glenn Brown Drawings at Frieze: Gagosian Gallery, Frieze Art Fair, London

Known for his elaborately worked paintings and sculptures, Brown now takes up the medium of drawing to further intensify his engagement with the texture of surfaces and mark making. Over the last few years, drawing has become an all-consuming enterprise for Brown. Rather than being preparatory tools for individual works, his drawings are independent and complete entities, in which new ideas are constantly explored and the traditional boundaries between drawing and painting cease to apply. In doing so, he offers a bold reinterpretation of the age old tradition of copying historical objects as a learning process.

As in all of his work, Brown appropriates images from Western art history: Dürer, Gossaert, Greuze, Delacroix, Murillo and Rubens are all referenced here. Different types of lines, shadings and stokes swirl as Brown investigates the languages of image making, where the abstract and the visceral, the rational and the irrational, the beautiful and grotesque, churn in a dizzying amalgamation of reference and form.