ART CITIES: N.York-Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown is known for the use of art historical references in his paintings. Starting with reproductions from other artist’s works, Brown transforms the appropriated image by changing its color, position and size. His grotesque yet fascinating figures appear to be painted with thick impasto, but are actually executed through the application of thin, swirling brushstrokes which create the illusion of almost photographically flat surfaces.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Glenn Brown’s new paintings that are on view in his solo exhibition “We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent”, include double portraits, twisted figures, and a large-scale still life with ripened quinces. The artist’s exacting mark making, which produces intricate loops and swirls of paint that appear to glide and float across the canvases’ surfaces, infuses these works with an ethereal vitality. After his last New York exhibition in 2014, Brown spent time concentrating exclusively on drawing, describing it as “the skeleton that holds the composition of any painting together.” In this exhibition, the technique becomes his starting point; each painting is based on an appropriated drawing. The work still hinges on art history and maintains his characteristic surrealist-symbolist look, but now Brown’s marks are bigger and bolder and his colors more fantastical, making every rendering intensely graphic and charged with accelerated motion. In “Bikini” (2022), a female and a male face are combined, Janus-like, yet tug painfully in opposite directions, woven together by undulating colored strands. The painting takes its title from Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands that was the site of multiple US nuclear tests, while the composition refers to drawings by Pompeo Batoni and Andrea del Sarto. The title of “Im Gestein” (2019–21) refers to a section of György Ligeti’s “Lux Aeterna”, a musical composition forever linked to Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001” (1968). Here Brown takes as his sources studies by Jan Willem Pieneman and Jan Van Noordt. In “We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent”  (2022) (the title was imagined by Brown but recalls Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”), two faces conjoined by one ear are balanced precariously on a tiny neck, while a curious hand and pointing finger drift up from a smoky, barren, dreamlike background. In addition to paintings and drawings, the exhibition also features two new sculptures, both of which recall the singular brushwork of Frank Auerbach and the monochromatic bronzes of Willem de Kooning. In “Soused” (2022) (the title means “drunk” or “soaked”), a slouched and dejected figure with no arms and one leg is propped up on a pedestal in an arrangement inspired by the elongated figures of Alina Szapocznikow and Alberto Giacometti. In “Hey Nonny Nonny/The Busker’s Empty Cap” (2022), Brown revisits his earlier sculptures, such as “Died in the Wool” (2020), and paintings, such as “Seventeen Seconds” (2005), achieving the same peculiar complexity as that of his two-dimensional work and sharing its faintly sinister air, which he has described as “like having a thief in the room”.

Photo Left: Glenn Brown, Dirty Creamer, 2022, Oil and india ink on cherry wood panel, 169.7 x 120.9 x 1.8 cm (66 7/8 x 47 5/8 x 3/4 in) panel, © Glenn Brown, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Right: Glenn Brown, We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent, 2022, Oil on panel, 200 x 141 x 2 cm (78 3/4 x 55 1/2 x 3/4 in), © Glenn Brown, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/11-23/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/