Glenn Brown: We'll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent

GB So this is the first show I'm doing where all of the paintings are based on old master drawings. Quite a few of them are double images. Multiple old master drawings have been overlaid onto each other, and from these I create a quite complex line drawing on panel, which I then paint over.

MG The brushwork is very different in these paintings.

GB Yes, I build up the illusion of a three-dimensional impasto that appears to be paint strokes created with large stiff brushes, but now I'm inventing the brush marks. Previously I would simulate the brushstrokes: the brushwork was a careful trompe l'oeil simulation of the original painting I was taking as a model or as an inspiration. But now that drawings are the source, I'm completely inventing the brushstrokes. So structurally, the paintings are very different from the paintings at the last show in New York. The way they're created is very different; both the preparatory work and the construction of the texture itself are different. My previous work could be described as altered photorealist paintings of paintings. Now, I am simultaneously constructing and inventing paintings of paintings.

Glenn Brown and Massimiliano Gioni, ‘The Taste of Others: Glenn Brown in conversation with Massimiliano Gioni’, in Glenn Brown: We'll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent, Gagosian New York 2023, p. 5.