Glenn Brown
dal 8/6/2011 al 22/6/2011
Segnalato da
8/6/2011
Glenn Brown
Gagosian Gallery, Geneve
Brown's Mannerist impulses produce complex and unsettling images inspired by his recollections of art of different historical eras fused with the culture of the present. Best known for his paintings, Brown has taken up the medium of etching to further intensify his engagement with the texture of surfaces.
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of etchings and sculpture by Glenn Brown.
'As time has gone on, I have increasingly detached myself from contemporary art. I still look at a lot, but I am far more drawn to the preceding five hundred years of the history of painting. It seems very short-sighted just to look at the history of the past few years when there is a much longer history to draw on. I don’t really believe in cultural evolution or a cultural progression. I think we just move around on a surface of intellectual debate. The way that Guido Reni described the human condition, which was rather kitsch and overwrought in many ways, informs me more than much contemporary painting ever could.'
(Glenn Brown)
Brown’s Mannerist impulses produce complex and unsettling images inspired by his recollections of art of different historical eras fused with the culture of the present. In these startling visual hybrids, familiar forms and motifs can be detected, but imbued with a grotesque otherworldliness. Best known for his elaborately worked paintings, Brown has taken up the medium of etching to further intensify his engagement with the texture of surfaces and mark-making. In doing so, he offers a bold reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century tradition of copying historical subjects as a learning process.
Taking portraits by Urs Graf, Lucien Freud, and Rembrandt, Brown scans the images and digitally manipulates them. He overlays a number of the scanned portraits to create composites. The composites are in turn used to produce a series of printing plates. These plates are used in combination to create the final etchings, layers upon layers of black ink. Some etchings are made up of up to fifteen different original source images. Using this intricate and time-intensive procedure, he collapses many different reproductive processes into single inky, spectral images, as seen in his Layered Portrait (After Lucien Freud), Layered Portrait (After Rembrandt), and Layered Portrait (After Urs Graf) (2008). By conflating the source images -- and thus copying and erasing them concurrently -- Brown creates entirely new portraits or, rather “anti-portraits,” where past and present are accreted into dense palimpsests, at once familiar and alien.
Glenn Brown was born in Northumberland, England in 1966. He studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education, then Goldsmith's College, London. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including Domaine de Kerguehennec Centre d'art contemporain, France (2000); “Delays and Revolutions”, Biennale di Venezia (2003); Serpentine Gallery, London (2004); “Ecstasy: In & About Altered States,” Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles (2005). A retrospective of his work was presented at Tate Liverpool in 2009, which traveled to Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin and Museum Ludwig, Budapest.
(Image: Glenn Brown, Layered Portrait (after Rembrandt) 7, 2008 Etching on paper, Velin Arches 300gsm, 14 x 11 3/8 inches)
Opening reception for the artist: Thursday, June 9th from 6-8pm
Gagosian Gallery Geneva
19 place de Longemalle, Geneva
Tues-Fri 11-7 and Sat 11-6