Glenn Brown

Todd Gallery, London
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1994

"I am attracted to the Gothic notion of a figure trapped somewhere between the psyche of the model, the artist, the photographer, the printing process and me"
The artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, 1997, p. 12.

Executed between 1992 and 1993, just after Brown had finished his training at Goldsmith's College, Night of the Living Dead is one of the earliest examples of his fully evolved style. This essentially post-modern work appropriates the imagery of Frank Auerbach but, through technique, fundamentally translates its significance. Whereas the textural drama of Auerbach's paintings critically evidences the salience of gesture, Brown's surface is glossy and perfectly smooth. Brown minutely replicates every striated detail of Auerbach's extravagant brushwork, but maintains an even paint layer and exactly flat finish. He has suggested that this makes the characters unfathomable.

The title references George A. Romero's cult 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which narrates the terrifying story of humans who are terrorized by zombies. In this context, Auerbach's image becomes hauntingly ghoulish and the implication of the cult icon offers another layer of interpretational complexity. As Brown himself has explained: "I'm distanced, I can let my imagination run rife, which is why they end up having exotic titles, from films and horror and narcissism, they become symbols for humanity, monsters, a sign for a sense of being rather than a specific person" (the artist interviewed by Marcelo Spinelli in Exhibition Catalogue, London, Karsten Schubert; Hexham, Queen's Hall Arts Centre, Glenn Brown, 1996, p. 7). Brown's bold assertion of colour is electrifying: individual hues, saturated like a colour Xerox, resonate dissonantly in an intense chorus of collective disparity.