Glenn Brown (born 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland, Great Britain, lives and works in London) is an English artist. In 1989 he took part in the touring exhibition New Contemporaries, dedicated to emerging young artists working in Britain. Three years later, he completed his MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (London).
Since the start of his career, Glenn Brown's art has been based on innovative methods of appropriating and reconfiguring works belonging mainly to the past. In his first solo show in France, for example, held in 2000 at the Centre d'art contemporain at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, the artist presented paintings imprinted with multiple references to the works of
Salvador Dalí, the existentialist portraits of the British artist Frank Auerbach, and illustrations issuing from the universe of
science fiction. He also showed sculptures that already corresponded to his works in two-dimensions with their smooth surfaces and deceptive looks.
Thanks to his perfect mastery of the trompe-l'œil technique, Glenn Brown succeeds in infusing his pictures with the illusion of depth. His use of a slightly garish palette, combined with a proliferation of marks and lines of all kinds, confers upon his works an expressive, reinvented classicism, a subjective mannerism, which continues right up to the present.
His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions with evocative titles both in Britain and abroad, signalling his role in the renewal of contemporary painting: a painting that looks at the history of western art in order to “digest” and “transform” its given styles, and subsequently to produce a psychological landscape and an idiosyncratic universe.
