Glenn Brown, CBE (born 1966), is a British artist celebrated for his intricate engagement with art history and his transformative approach to appropriation. Drawing from reproductions of works by other artists, Brown reimagines these sources by altering their color, orientation, and scale. His figures—often grotesque yet mesmerizing—seem to be rendered in thick impasto but are in fact composed of meticulously applied, fine, swirling brushstrokes that create the illusion of smooth, almost photographic flatness. This tension between illusion and surface generates a powerful, often unsettling visual language that transcends time, style, and convention. For Brown, such acts of transformation and contradiction lie at the core of his artistic practice.Sculpture also occupies a central role in Brown’s oeuvre. He constructs these works by layering dense accumulations of oil paint over armatures or found bronze casts, emphasizing the tactile, three-dimensional quality of brushwork. In doing so, his sculptures stand in deliberate contrast to the pictorial flatness of his paintings, while still referencing the formal and chromatic vocabularies of other artists’ works.In recent years, Brown has increasingly turned his attention to drawing. While still conceptually rooted in art historical dialogue, his drawings expand upon his established visual strategies—stretching, combining, distorting, and layering imagery to produce subtle yet intricately composed works of line and form.
