Glenn Brown : Patrick Painter, Los Angeles
Patrick Painter Inc. proudly presents new paintings by Glenn Brown.
The exhibition features 7 new paintings, in which the artist continues his practice of appropriating figures and subjects from historic and current visual sources from fine art to popular culture. This body of work merges painted copies of great master paintings with references to film, literature and music. Using photographic reproductions of original art works, often themselves inaccurate copies, Brown subverts the images he appropriates: surfaces are flattened, impastoed brushstrokes exaggerated, colours heightened and images distorted and cropped.
The Revolutionary Corps of Teenage Jesus; Hunky Dory; Led Zeppelin; Greetings from the Future; Seventeen Seconds; Pornography; and Earth are titles of the paintings, alluding to album title and songs from mostly Romantic, Gothic or Punk bands known for their melancholic lyrics and social commentary. Brown’s work references the predecessor - the cultural history - by band, by art historical reference, adding his own humorously dark twists along the way. Iconographic portraits by historical and modern painters such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Salvador Dalí and Frank Auerbach reoccur thought out Brown’s re-interpretation and resurrection of still lifes and portraiture.
Brown collapses the barriers that distinguish ‘high’ art from ‘low’ culture and fuses images from different historical eras and cultural practice, resulting in visual hybrids that confront the viewer with an imaginary world. The artist further indulges his obvious love of painting, centering his practice on a hermetic, elitist, and astute engagement with painting’s history and attempts to further along the turn of it’s waning disfavor in the eyes of “high art”. Brown has reclaimed painting precisely because it is popular, not high, “because it is vulgar, emotional, and fraught with humor, black and baudy”.
Born in Northumberland, England in 1966, Glenn Brown studied at the Norwich School of Art and the Bath College of Higher Education before receiving an M.A. in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College. Brown has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000. The artist currently lives and works in London.
A reception for the artist will be held Saturday, April 2nd, 2005, 6 – 8 pm.
