Video produced on the occasion of the Glenn Brown lecture at Emily Carr University on 24 October 2013.
The event was held prior to the opening of the Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren show at Rennie Collection, Vancouver.
Brown is famed for his evocative large-scale oil paintings, which explore and rework images from a diverse expanse of art history. Spring boarding from his influences (ranging from science fiction panoramas, Renaissance still lifes and classical portraiture), his signature abundant, smooth and swirling brushstrokes mark his work with a still air of strangeness reminiscent of early European Surrealists. His subjects are at once dead and alive, oscillating between homages to artists who came before him and melancholy evidences of their mortality. His meticulous, carefully rendered surfaces challenge the Modernist notion that expressiveness in painting is inseparable from speed. Revolutionary eras of art history collide with stylistic brawn in Brown’s work, resulting in eerie and dramatic testaments to his predecessors and a steadfast testament to the fact that painting is not yet, in fact dead.
Rennie Collection is pleased to announce the first exhibition in Canada of work by Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren. This also marks the first time these two Turner Prize-nominated artists have shown together. Seven paintings and a sculpture by Brown are presented in tandem with a series of Warren’s clay and bronze sculptures.