This book was published to celebrate the exhibition Glenn Brown: And Thus We Existed across two gallery spaces at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin in the autumn of 2020. It also highlights the exhibition of Glenn Brown at Musée National Eugène-Delacroix, Paris in the autumn of 2019, as well as other recently completed works. The first article for the book was written by Dawn Adès, touching on Glenn's links with the Surrealists, followed by an interview with Glenn about his latest works and motivations.  

 

“Glenn Brown, like Magritte, challenges the accusation that a painter is ‘only an eye’ by paradoxically insisting on the eye’s fundamental importance. He is a conceptual artist denying the separation of eye and brain, and moreover making paint – apparently the victim of conceptual art, which declared painting dead – the active agent. If this is the tail end of painting, if is a ‘remarkably prehensile tail’.”

Dawn Adès, ‘The Art of Painting and Approprating Art’, in: Glenn Brown: And Thus We Existed, Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publication 2021, p. 7

“I want the viewer to look, for their eye to move along these long lines and curves. I rarely have straight lines in my paintings as my work tends to represent the baroque idea of nature dominating man, rather than man’s domination of nature as found in the rigidity of classical or modernist art. To create that sense of movement, you have to have interesting differences of texture and colour. It’s good to have sharp points and dull points, smooth flat areas and detailed, intricate ones, areas you’d like to caress and areas you wouldn’t want to touch. The painting should be made up of all these different surfaces because your eye does caress the surface of the painting, similarly to the sensation of your hand moving over the surface of it.”

Glenn Brown, ‘Interview at Galerie Max Hetzler’, in: Glenn Brown: And Thus We Existed, Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London / Holzwarth Publication 2021, p. 122

 

Book design by Peter Willberg