Glenn Brown English out of print |
“I’m rather like Dr. Frankenstein, constructing paintings out of the residue or dead parts of other artist’s work.” Glenn Brown Tom Morton likens Glenn Brown’s paintings to a zombie comedy. Theatre is the chest-up portrait of a skeleton whose bones are composed of a sludgy organic-looking substance somewhere between flesh, PVA glue, and raspberry ripple ice cream, while the doleful mutant heads in Asylums of Mars and The Hinterland have seemingly grown in the lab of some crazed geneticist. Brown’s Frankenstein-like approach to the art of the past becomes clear as he performs operations on models by Murillo, van Gogh, or the Venus of Milo. The book Glenn Brown presents six recent works by the artist from 2006 on deluxe tipped-in color plates, including a detail of each painting that makes Brown’s technique comprehensible in this large format. The painter fills the ground with flowing whirlpools of shifting colors. But what initially looks like thick brushstrokes is revealed upon closer examination to be executed in very thin layers of paint; one could say that the paint itself is painted.
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