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Artist Glenn Brown: "The language of art develops over centuries." | Louisiana Channel
“Every hour of the day should be spent creating something new.”
We visited British painter Glenn Brown in his London studio and discovered an artist with a truly unique visual language.
“I have a big library. I have lots of images stored on the computer. Or I visit museums to find other images. All of my work is based on other artists’ work. It’s just me. There are millions and millions of images already out there. And I love having this relationship and conversation with art history.”
Glenn Brown’s (b. 1966) practice is one in which concerns of a technical, aesthetic and spiritual nature are explored through an eclectic mix of influences. Spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, the artist reflects upon the history of art without confining himself to a specific period. The sources for his works can be found in the works of Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Adolph von Menzel, Surrealists (especially Salvador Dalí), or artists including Karel Appel, Frank Auerbach and Georg Baselitz, as well as sci-fi painters such as Chris Foss. Deliberately drawing from reproductions, Brown manipulates this imagery, often beyond recognition, before transposing them into works of an unparalleled uncanniness, where colours and forms undergo further re-assessment.
“My paintings are not meant to look like Old Master Paintings. Nobody would ever look at them and think they were painted in the 17th or 18th century. There is something deeply 21st-century about them. About the way I use colour, just the way I paint. My work is very much painting in the digital age, in the age of reproduction and photography. All of those things have been very important; you can see them on the surface and how I paint. But I do think that they have a dialogue with the Old Masters in terms of the way we relate to the human form.”
“Old Master artists were taught in a very different way. They were taught in a far more academic way. They had to go through a process of learning from other artists. They had a big toolbox of skills that they developed. And I think that the toolbox of 20th or 21st-century artists is more limited to some extent because we are far more interested in concepts and the whole reasons for making a painting rather than the actual process of making a painting.”
Mining art history and popular culture, Glenn Brown has created an artistic language that eschews categorization. His mannerist impulses stem from a desire to breathe new life into history, using its forms as vehicles for his exploration of paint. “Mannerism is all about distortion. It’s all about enlarging hands. Making the feet important, maybe more expressive than they would normally be. Mannerism is about trying to make a figure express what it’s like to be a person, not what it’s like to look like a person. So, it’s about the inner feelings to some extent. It’s how it feels to move and feel sorrow, happiness, love, or joy. It’s trying to express the inner human being on the outside of the body. And I suppose that’s why I would describe myself as a Mannerist painter.”
To complement his painting practice, he creates sculptures by accumulating thick layers of oil paint over structures or found bronze casts. Brown has also produced detailed drawings to further explore the uncanny juxtapositions in his paintings. Since 2013, he has increased his engagement with drawing’s tactility, using different types of lines, shadings, and strokes to reinterpret the age-old tradition of copying historical subjects as a learning tool. His drawings reinforce the importance of gesture, echoing the layered lines of Old Master sketches.
Exhibitions such as the British Museum’s Historical Baggage: Glenn Brown and His Sources (2018) have made the links between Brown’s works and those from which he draws inspiration even more apparent. The show paired early portraits based on prints by Rembrandt van Rijn and Lucian Freud with Brown’s 2012 series Half-Life, a new engagement with Rembrandt’s work, revealing Brown’s intricate technical evolution over the past decade. In 2022, Brown established the Brown Collection in London, an art museum showcasing his artwork alongside his choice of works by contemporary and historical artists.
Glenn Brown was interviewed by Malte Bruun Fals in his London studio in June 2023.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Edited by: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025" from the video introduction
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