Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler Selected Works Videos
Related Links

Glenn Brown’s practice is one in which concerns of a technical, aesthetic and spiritual nature are explored through an eclectic mix of influences. Spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, the artist reflects upon the history of art without confining himself to a specific period. The sources for his works can be found in the works of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Adolph von Menzel, Surrealists – especially Salvador Dalí – or artists including Karel Appel, Frank Auerbach and Georg Baselitz, as well as sci-fi painters such as Chris Foss and Adolph Schaller. Deliberately drawing from reproductions, Brown manipulates this imagery, often beyond recognition, before transposing it into works of an unparalleled uncanniness, where colours and forms undergo further re-assessment.

Brown could be perceived as the ultimate Mannerist painter, perplexing the viewer with distorted, exaggerated and sometimes grotesque forms. His technical virtuosity is captivating. Executed in the traditional medium of oil paint, his paintings act as trompe-l'oeil, showing swirls of colour which at first glance seem to form a thick impasto, until surfaces reveal themselves to be actually smooth. Both alluring and unsettling, ranging from monstrous to melancholic, Brown’s paintings – like his drawings and sculptures – broadcast a pronounced indifference to common distinctions between good and bad taste, or beauty and abjection.

"Everything oozes majestically. The paintings and sculptures of Glenn Brown are deliquescent in the physical sense of the term, the property possessed by certain solid substances of slow liquefaction by gradual absorption of atmospheric humidity. Description of this now jubilant, now morbid magma gives rise to an unending, indeed unbearable succession of sugarcoated adjectives, adverbs and nouns. One can come at these paintings only tentatively, by narratives and descriptions, by impressions, by repetitions and sonorities and by the contradictions in which they are so rich. Any language that can encompass the work of Brown must necessarily be vague, full of double-talk and ambiguity, for this is the way in which the artist treats images."

Jean-Marie Gallais, 'Exquisite Deliquescence' in Glenn Brown, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

Image: Nigger of the World, 2011, oil on panel, 172 x 138 cm

Solo Exhibitions

GLENN BROWN - Galerie Max Hetzler

Dessins

57, rue du Temple, Paris

5 September – 10 October 2015
Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Glenn Brown

(catalogue)

Galerie Max Hetzler Temporary, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin-Charlottenburg

8 April – 28 May 2011
Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Glenn Brown

(catalogue)

Zimmerstraße 90/91, Berlin-Mitte

3 February – 11 March 2006
Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Glenn Brown

Zimmerstraße 90/91, Berlin-Mitte

17 September – 26 October 2002
Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Paintings and Sculptures

Zimmerstraße 90/91, Berlin-Mitte

15 April – 3 June 2000

Group Exhibitions

INPUT / OUTPUT: PAINTING AFTER TECHNOLOGY - Galerie Max Hetzler

INPUT / OUTPUT: PAINTING AFTER TECHNOLOGY

Glenn Brown, Jeff Elrod, Julian Schnabel, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Michael Williams, Christopher Wool, and Toby Ziegler

41 Dover Street, London

16 April – 25 May 2019
MATIÈRE GRISE - Galerie Max Hetzler

MATIÈRE GRISE

Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Jérémy Demester, Günther Förg, Loris Gréaud, Raymond Hains, Charline von Heyl, Liz Larner, Navid Nuur, Albert Oehlen, Edmund de Waal

57, rue du Temple, Paris

10 June – 20 July 2017
REMEMBER EVERYTHING - Galerie Max Hetzler

REMEMBER EVERYTHING

40 Years Galerie Max Hetzler
Darren Almond, Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Rineke Dijkstra, Günther Förg, Mona Hatoum, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, Marepe, Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Frank Nitsche, Albert Oehlen, Yves Oppenheim, Richard Phillips, Michael Raedecker, Bridget Riley, Thomas Struth, Rebecca Warren, Christopher Wool, Toby Ziegler
(catalogue)

Oudenarder Straße 16-20, Berlin-Wedding

10 November – 21 December 2013

Selected Institutional Exhibitions

GLENN BROWN

TRANSMUTATIONS: Glenn Brown / What’s Old is New Again

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene

18 May – 19 August 2018
GLENN BROWN

GLENN BROWN

Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

9 September 2016 – 15 January 2017
GLENN BROWN

Suffer Well

Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles

14 May – 11 September 2016
Glenn Brown and the Old Masters

Glenn Brown and the Old Masters

Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem

1 November 2013 – 16 February 2014

Biography

Show Vita
Show Selected Bibliography

Publications

Dessins - Galerie Max Hetzler

Dessins

Glenn Brown

Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2015
With a text by Andreas Schalhorn

€ 50.00

Leaf through book
REMEMBER EVERYTHING - Galerie Max Hetzler

REMEMBER EVERYTHING

Darren Almond, Glenn Brown, André Butzer, Rineke Dijkstra, Günther Förg, Mona Hatoum, Jeff Koons, Vera Lutter, Marepe, Beatriz Milhazes, Ernesto Neto, Frank Nitsche, Albert Oehlen, Yves Oppenheim, Richard Phillips, Michael Raedecker, Bridget Riley, Thomas Struth, Rebecca Warren, Christopher Wool, Toby Ziegler

Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications / Ridinghouse, Berlin and London 2014
With texts by Julie Sylvester and Jean-Marie Gallais
Edited by Jean-Marie Gallais

€ 45.00

Leaf through book
Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Glenn Brown

Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2011
With a text by Jean-Marie Gallais

€ 35.00

Glenn Brown - Galerie Max Hetzler

Glenn Brown

Galerie Max Hetzler / Holzwarth Publications, Berlin 2006
With a text by Tom Morton

€ 35.00

Selected Press

Art Monthly 2009

Frieze 2009

Financial Times 2009

Art in America 2009

Parkett 2005

The Guardian 2004

Frieze 1993

News

Glenn Brown

Comeback. Art-Historical Renaissances (group show)
Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen
20 July - 10 November 2019

Times of upheaval create a desire for orientation in the past. Accordingly, everything historical in our present economy: In the advertising, fashion and film world, the "old" as the authentic in opposition to a mass-produced unity culture in position and often transfigured nostalgic.

Art ...
Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown

Inspired by Rembrandt. 100 Years of Collecting by The Rembrandt House Museum (group show)
The Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam
7 June - 1 September 2019

The Rembrandt House is not just Rembrandt’s former home and workshop; for more than a century it has been a museum with its own collection. The collection consists primarily of works on paper. Rembrandt’s etchings are of course well represented, but the museum also has prints by his predecessors and ...
Glenn Brown