Glenn Brown: Art as a subconscious dream
Glenn BrownThe work exists in a strange space where beauty and grotesquite intertwine, creating images that feel both familiar and foreign. His paintings often appear as if they were drawn from a collective subconscious, a swirling mass of historical references and mutated forms. Brown described his art as having “a foot in the grave”, evoking a feeling of something neither completely alive nor entirely dead. Its figures and compositions, although often from the history of art, are stretched, distorted and redesigned, forming disturbing but fascinating visual experiences. This transformation of preexisting imaging allows Brown to create works that seem timeless – rooted rooted in the past and oscillating outside.
The strange quality of Brown's work stems from his fascination for the intersection of the beautiful and the grotesque. Its paintings often represent figures with exaggerated characteristics, elongated limbs or faces which seem to dissolve in amorphous forms. Although these images can evoke conventional portraits or baroque compositions, they carry a nightmarish quality, as if they were seen through the distortion of memory or a dream. Brown compares his approach to the way in which the mind treats images in sleep – merging, mutating and reforming. His paintings refuse to settle in a single stable identity, rather offering an experience of visual flow which disturbs and fascinates in an equal measure.
This limit quality is at the heart of Brown's artistic philosophy. It resists the notion of fixed meaning, preferring to create works that exist in a state of perpetual transformation. By engaging with historical images in a way that extends their original intention, he disrupts their stability, inviting viewers to reconsider the boundaries between past and present, between what is recalled and what is imagined. His paintings, often oscillating between the kingdoms of classical elegance and distortion, question our expectations of art and perception, making us ask where recognition ends and invention begins.
Glenn Brown: appropriation, transformation and the weight of art history
Brown's deep commitment to art history is one of the decisive characteristics of his work. Rather than treating historical paintings as fixed artifacts, he considers them as living – mutable entities, open to reinvention and capable of new interpretations. Its appropriation process does not imply direct replication; Instead, he takes existing images and subjects them to intense manipulation. The colors change unpredictably, the proportions deform beyond recognition and emotional tones are completely redesigned. By distorting and recontextualizing these images, Brown creates works that recognize their historical line while freeing them, by transforming them into something that does not belong to any period of time.
This approach was not without controversy. Some criticisms and artists have accused Brown of turning too close to plagiarism, wondering if its manipulation of historical paintings constitutes a real act of creation. Brown, however, firmly rejects such accusations, arguing that his work is rooted in transformation rather than simple replication. He underlines the long history of artistic borrowing and reinterpretation, noting that painting itself has always been an evolving conversation through generations. Its compositions are often hybrids, incorporating several sources at the same time, mixing them in forms that little like their origins. The end result is not a simple appropriation, but rather a complete reinvention – which questions the very nature of the originality of art.
For Brown, the past is not a fixed entity but a tank of images waiting to be reshaped. His work initiates a dialogue with the masters of previous centuries, but he resists nostalgia. Instead of preserving history, he fractures it, stretching and contortioning his visual language in something unknown. Its paintings exist in a space which is neither entirely historical nor entirely contemporary – tireless but unstable, familiar but completely foreign. By continuously reshaping the history of art through its objective, Brown guarantees that the past remains in motion, never settling in a singular story but constantly evolving unexpectedly.
The illusion of texture: painting in the digital age
A decisive characteristic of Brown's paintings is their illusion of texture. At first glance, his works seem thick with the Impasto, their swirling brushstrokes apparently built in sculptural layers of paint. However, looking at it, their surfaces are incredibly smooth, devoid of the physical weight that the eye awaits. This contradiction between appearance and reality plays a crucial role in its artistic philosophy. In it imitating the appearance of impasto while keeping its surfaces flat, Brown disturbs the sensory expectations of the spectator, forcing them to engage with painting in a new way.
This illusionist quality is closely linked to Brown use of digital technology. Before starting a paint, he handles images on a computer, experimenting with distortions, recombinations and color changes. This allows him to push the transformation of an image far beyond what traditional sketch methods could allow. However, despite this embrace of digital tools, Brown remains attached to the physical act of painting. He considers oil painting as having an almost alchemical power – something capable of capturing the ineffable, which technology alone cannot reproduce. His work ultimately exists in the tension between digital and handy, between technological manipulation and the old profession of painting.
The visceral impact of Brown's paintings extends beyond the purely visual. Many viewers report feel the desire to touch – or even the taste – whirling forms, as if they were about to be tangible. This reaction underlines the sensory ambiguity of his work, where the texture is simultaneously present and absent. The paintings create a space of contradiction, where the eye believes in the substance, but the hand would find none. By reversing our expectations of materiality, Brown forces us to reconsider our relationship with painting itself, by questioning not only what we see, but also how we live art at a physical level.
Glenn Brown: sculpture, drawing and expansion of the artistic language
While Brown is mainly known for his paintings, his practice has spread to sculpture and drawing, each medium offering new ways to explore ideas at the heart of his work. His sculptures, for example, represent a radical inversion of the illusionist plane of his paintings. Instead of creating the appearance of a thick painting while keeping the surface smooth, its sculptures make the brushstroke completely three -dimensional. Built from layers of oil paint on existing bronze figures, these works exaggerate texture, making painting itself a sculptural element. In doing so, Brown transforms the ephemeral gesture with a brushstroke into something solid, something physically present in space.
His first sculptures were deliberately placed on the floor of the gallery, appearing as if they had collapsed with a painting, rejecting the traditional pedestal. However, the fragility of these works led Brown to possibly lock them in glass windows. This change has not only protected them, but also introduced a new dynamic – an interaction between confinement and exposure. Enveloped in the glass, sculptures take an almost scientific quality, as if they were specimens preserved for the study. This confinement adds to their strange nature, strengthening the idea that Brown's work exists in a state of perpetual transformation, never completely belonging to one area or another.
In recent years, drawing has become an increasingly vital part of Brown's practice. Inspired by the old master sketches, he incorporates their gestural energy into his own works, superimposing several historical images to each other to create compositions that pulse with movement. His drawings, just like his paintings, resist fixed identities, presenting rather figures and forms which dissolve and reform under the eyes of the spectator. By engaging with drawing as a main support rather than a simple preparatory tool, Brown continues its exploration of the changing and unstable nature of images, demonstrating that the act of transformation is not limited to a single medium, but is the very foundation of its artistic vision.
