Glenn Brown

"To me, [Auerbach's] work epitomises existentialism through his depiction of the isolated, tortured figure. His brushmarks really grab the canvas. They have a sense of rhythm and timing that I find very compelling.... I adore his paintings, their strange sense of colour and their beguiling sense of fluidity."

(the artist cited in Rochelle Steiner, 'Interview with Glenn Brown' in Exhibition Catalogue, London, The Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 98)

Taking his cue from the founders of Appropriation Art, Glenn Brown's quintessentially post-modern approach to painting borrows images from a diverse range of visual sources, both historic and current, and repaints them in manner entirely his own. The Rebel, 2001, is one of his most successful works that takes as its source image one of Frank Auerbach's heavily impastoed portraits. In a masterpiece of trompe l'oeil painting, the thick ridges and dripping skeins of Auerbach's heavily textured surfaces are meticulously rendered in minute detail on a flawlessly flat, highly polished surface, making them look almost photographic. This is precisely Brown's point, who works from reproductions of fine art images to reflect how often we experience art at second-hand, though photographs. He accentuates this further by choosing reproductions that aren't always faithful to the original paintings in colour or tone, and then cropping or otherwise manipulating the images.

Using fine fibre brushes and a technique that looks back to Jan van Eyck and the Old Masters, Brown patiently and reverentially transcribes Auerbach's vigorous drama-laden brushstrokes into a completely smooth, illusionistic rendering. He also enhances the out of focus, poorly lit characteristics of his photographic source image by casting the right and lower composition under a Richteresque sfumato cloud in which the individual brushstrokes merge together and loose their coherent descriptive ability. This in turn draws the viewer's gaze back to the centre of the composition where the clarity and scientific detail of the curling, twisting brushmarks give sublime new voice to the delicacy of paint. Despite its resolute flatness, the surface has a feeling of intense fluidity which underlines the inherent artifice of painting and challenges the Modernist obsession with the impassioned painterly gesture.

Making subtle alterations to Auerbach's composition and palette, the older artist's Expressionist practice is usurped by a cool, dispassionate brand of painterly showmanship whose cerebral nature is anathema to the emotionally charged conventions of Expressionism. In an age where painterly style and technical skill have become devalued by the proliferation of new media, what makes the present work so compelling is the dexterity and skill of the artist whose illusionism is so visually credible. Writing a new chapter in the history of the brushstroke in art, Brown's unique painterly vision achieves the same coolness and critical distance found in Richard Prince's photography in the more refined and articulate realm of painting.