Glenn Brown: Editions and A Unique Sculpture: Patrick painter, Los Angeles

Throughout his career, Brown has blended references from the history of painting with his characteristic technique. Using titles derived from pop-culture, usually from rock and roll songs, Brown’s current works can be seen as visual hybrids of pre-existing media.

In Brown’s previous work, he hints at his appropriations while managing to just elude specificity. In his new works, the elements that make up Brown’s image-remixes have never been so clear. With the subtitles of each work corresponding to the artists responsible for the original paintings, Brown allows the viewer to decipher the images he intricately combines.

Two such works are photographic montages featuring landscapes, one by Sanford Gifford and the other by Thomas Moran, with the hands of Jesus from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. By superimposing the images, the open palms of the crucified messiah seem to cradle the nineteenth century land and seascapes.

Some of the most interesting pieces are the result of Brown’s incorporation of his own paintings. The series of works entitled “Comfortably Numb” blends one of Brown’s earlier paintings with Guido Reni’s seventeenth century portrait of Jesus. The figure of Jesus comes through in vivid waves of Glenn Brown’s stylistic paint strokes, adding an element of physicallity not present in the Reni work. The title, derived from the Pink Floyd song, speaks to what this Jesus represents – a cross-generational dream of salvation being lost to so many and decreasing concreteness the figure of Christ and what it represents.

And then there’s the sculpture, and what a sculpture it is. Brown has never shown something of this magnitude, either scale or artistic, before. Here, Brown manages to capture all the energy of his paintings in a three-dimensional form. Where normally drips of paint are confined within the straight edges of canvas, the wet paint on the sculpture knows no bounds, hanging and creeping as it pleases away from the main form. “I am interested in exploring the way gravity can be represented in both two and thee dimensions....I see the sculptural brush marks as challenging the logic of paint in that they appear to defy gravity by actually staying upright,” Brown says.

As the Tate Museum, Liverpool gears up to do a major retrospective of Brown’s career, these new works add another layer to the Glenn Brown oeuvre. Though many of his references and his artistic prowess have seemed obvious before, never has each been given the ability to read so clearly to the viewer.