Coinciding with Frieze London 2023, the Brown Collection presents its third exhibition, The Leisure Centre, at Bentinck Mews in Marylebone, London. The exhibition brings together works by Glenn Brown with artists from the past and present, from Brown’s personal collection.

The Brown Collection

The catalogue accompanying Glenn Brown’s double exhibition The Real Thing, currently on view at the Sprengel Museum and Landesmuseum Hannover until 18 June 2023, is now available for purchase. This publication condenses the key ideas of the exhibition, which presents Brown’s work alongside a selection of historical masterworks from the two collections. In this way, Brown brings continuities and contrasts from 500 years of painting into a contemporary dialogue. The publication contains new texts by Jurriaan Benschop, Katja Lembke, and Reinhard Spieler, as well as a conversation with the artist.

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KINDL Berlin will present a solo exhibition of works by Friedrich Kunath, encompassing painting, sculpture, installation and video. With references to landscape painting, GDR television, and pop music, the presentation will revolve around questions of distant wanderings and arrival. Kunath combines themes such as longing, loneliness, euphoria and fear with impressions of his adopted home in California. The works, often exaggerated to the point of the grotesque, comment on the present in a way that is as melancholy as it is astutely humorous.

KINDL Berlin

CAC Malaga will present Friedrich Kunath’s first museum exhibition in Spain. Kunath’s oeuvre spans painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and video. Informed by the artist’s own personal history, but also music, German Romanticism and American pop culture, the works are imbued with both tradition and modernity, and illustrate themes of tragedy, comedy and romance, freely shifting between the three and occupying a unique space between irony and sincerity. 

This landmark exhibition will combine old, modern and contemporary masters across two major institutions in Germany: the Sprengel Museum and Landesmuseum Hannover. Glenn Brown will reimagine the permanent collections of both, generating a conversation around contemporary and historic art that is both evocative and enlightening.

The exhibition at the Sprengel Museum will consist of two parts: a solo exhibition of works by Glenn Brown in the main room and thematic interventions in the permanent collection rooms. Formative paintings by Brown, such as The Real Thing, 2000, as well as more recent works, including Black Ships Ate The Sky, 2020, and Doggerland, 2022, will be on view.

The exhibition at the Landesmuseum will likewise present works from the collection alongside drawings and paintings by Brown, encouraging a dialogue with Brown’s key influences, from Dutch still life painting to the German landscape tradition.

With Glenn Brown acting as both artist and curator, the dual projects will highlight the contemporary relevance of both historical collections.

Glenn Brown's work, Burlesque, 2008 is part of the group show Les Choses (Things) at the Louvre. The exhibition revisits the still life genre from the perspective of the ongoing dialogue between past and present artists. It sheds new light on our attachment to material things, while covering the history of art from prehistoric axes to Chardin, Manet and the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. The exhibition opens on 12 October 2022 and is on view until 23 January 2023.

Louvre Museum 

The Brown Collection is home to the art collection of the British artist Glenn Brown, CBE. With over three floors of exhibition space in a renovated warehouse in Marylebone, London, the building also houses the artist’s archives and administrative offices.

The inaugural exhibition shows the breadth of Brown’s body of work, including paintings, drawings and sculptures. These include the artist’s early appropriations of Frank Auerback and Jean-Honore Fragonard in Shallow Deaths, 2000, and Shallow End, 2011, exquisite mid-career drawings in antique frames, and paintings such as On the Way to the Leisure Centre, 2018, as well as his newest works that highlight a distinctive painterly drawing mark on layered portraits after Renaissance Old Masters. Future exhibitions will include works by other historical and contemporary artists that have inspired or converse with works in the collection. Brown also intends to create a large, site-specific mural work after Abraham Bloemaert in the galleries in the future.

Wheelchair or special access is available by appointment.

Address:
The Brown Collection
1 Bentinck Mews
London W1U 2AF

Opening hours during Frieze London:
Tuesday, 11 October to Sunday, 16 October 2022
11 am – 6 pm

Regular opening hours:
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays
11 am – 6 pm

Glenn Brown