Somehow too perfect to be the originals (there's usually something modest about really great paintings) they drift in and out of focus like a ghost caught in a time machine or the mind of someone looking at art. As a painting it's far less slick than the Auerbachs, but as an idea it's a lot more interesting.īrown's trademark is the flattened painterly gesture - Auerbach without the impastoed anguish, Rembrandt without the biographical gloom, Fragonard without the frivolity.
In The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (after John Martin) (1998), for example, an image of the future wrestles with a futuristic vision from the past, filtered through the complex relationship the artist has with the memory of memorable paintings.
If the Auerbach copies look like a young painter laughing at the Expressionist credo of more-paint-equals-more-feeling, then signs of a lover's struggle litter the surfaces of the big sci-fi pictures. It's more that they seem to be about different things - the cyclical dreams of art history (Fragonard) or the architecture of paint (Salvador Dali) or slippery time shifts (the science fiction illustrator Chris Foss) or humour (every title) or debunking heroics or whatever it is you expect a painting to do. It's not just that they reference sources from different centuries and juxtapose titles with images they seem to have nothing to do with. Although his virtuoso paintbrush wielding links the look of the paintings - hyper-real images of unreality - each is different from the one that precedes it.
A huge sci-fi painting is titled Böcklin's Tomb (after Chris Foss) (1998) turn the corner and a Fragonard child with De Kooning flesh, Disco (1997-98), stares across the room at an Auerbach portrait, Bertrand Russell at the BBC (1999), which looks as if it was pulled out from beneath a steam roller.īut this isn't a group show - every one of the 19 paintings, two sculptures and two photographs is by Glenn Brown. At first glance this looks like a group show curated by someone tripping so high they got the labels wrong: an exquisite little Rembrandt called I Lost My heart to a Starship Trooper (1996) is hung near the Böcklin-esque Zombies of the Stratosphere (1999).
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