He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000. From 1984 to 1992 he studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education and then Goldsmith’s College, London. To look at one of Brown’s works is to witness an unravelling of the languages of painting and the modes of pictorial solution that have preoccupied artists for centuries. Groups of works reveal the artist’s manipulation of brushwork, form, technique, subject matter, genre, narrative and colour. Spanning the last eighteen years, this exhibition is selected and arranged according to Brown’s perennial intrigue in the history and processes of painting. In his work, naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated and enlarged into the grotesque, flesh grows or begins to rot and heavy impasto brush-marks, painstakingly copied, are rendered completely flat. Brown adopts these various accidental alterations as painterly strategies, grossly exaggerating them to question what it is to paint and to transfer people, places and objects into this medium. Texture is lost and colour distorted as the inaccuracies of the printing process take hold. Often cropped, its scale shifts as it is transferred to a new format.

Yet it is not original paintings that Brown turns to for inspiration but reproductions – images printed on postcards, in books or digitised on the internet.īrown is fascinated by how an image changes when it is reproduced. Paintings by Rembrandt, Fragonard, Salvador Dalí, Frank Auerbach and many others, including the illustrators for science fiction novels, have all been used by the artist as starting blocks. Borrowing from art history and popular culture, Glenn Brown transforms a familiar visual history into something extraordinary and alien. Tate Liverpool presents today Glenn Brown, on view through May 10, 2009.

Glenn brown artwork