London painter is a first

The exhibit opening of Glenn Brown is slated for Saturday, May 21, 2016 at the Des Moines Art Center in the Anna K. Meredith Gallery with approximately 25 paintings, sculptures, and prints. Organized by Jeff Fleming, Director of the Des Moines Art Center, the show remains on view through August 21, 2016.

Brown (born 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland) is the first U.S., one-person, survey exhibition of the London-based painter. Reproductions of canonical paintings chosen from art history books, magazines and the Internet are the sources of Brown’s imagery. He borrows from old masters such as, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, as well as from contemporary artists such as Frank Auerbach and Willem de Kooning. Through these, he quotes painting’s traditional subjects and techniques, of which many are outdated, and makes them fresh and new. By reaching back into art history, Brown plays with our ideas of what art is, while simultaneously looking to the future of painting.

 

After selecting a painting, Brown digitally alters the image’s colors, stretches and compresses, or adds and subtracts portions to his liking through Photoshop. He then projects the results of his reconstructions on to a canvas or board and painstakingly paints the image.

 

Exaggerated and often grotesque forms appear in garish colors and dissolve into abstraction. Through his technical virtuosity and a stylized trompe-l’oeil approach, his paintings appear expressionistic or painterly with heavy impasto, but in actuality their surfaces are smooth and flat. He says, “I have no option other than to appropriate or transpose the images that the world has thrown at me.” In doing so, Brown examines our collective ideas of what constitutes a language of images. More on Brown at: http://glenn-brown.co.uk.

 

Editor’s note: A fully illustrated catalog will accompany the exhibition and will include an essay by Director Fleming; an interview with the artist by Steven Matijcio, curator at the Contemporary Arts Center(CAC) in Cincinnati, Ohio; and an essay by James Clifton, Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, and Curator, Renaissance and Baroque Painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The exhibition will open at CAC September 9, 2016 and remain on view through January 15, 2017.