Glenn Brown

by Rochelle & LEWIS STEINER, Alison M. Gingeras

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Genres: Art

108 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2004

Reviews

[XenofoneX · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best artists working today, Glenn Brown has an artistic vision and style that also makes him the most original painter to emerge from a generation of exciting and talented artists seeking to revitalize the medium. His works are instantly recognizable: His 'models', appropriated from online jpegs of works by Velazquez, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Dali and Baselitz, among others, are transformed into garish, almost frightening mutations, flesh seeming to swirl in a liquid state made up of oils. Thick impasto globs and ridges are prevalent, particularly when he toys with the big names of expressionism and neo-expressionism. But all these haphazard swirls and globs and palette-knife ridges and drips are actually... lies. Using tiny brushes and surgical precision, he creates a 3-D illusion of the marks that appeared on the canvas of the subject material, a Trompe L'Oeil (Trick of the Eye) that people seeing his work a few feet away on the Gallery wall find hard to believe. His paintings are perfectly flat, perfectly smooth, giving the impression of a print or photograph. This ability to create a convincing illusion goes back to the revolutionary advances in painting during the Renaissance, when artists like Van Eyck and Van Der Weiden demonstrated the possibilities of Oil-painting over tempera. The philosophies of modernist critics like Clement Greenberg and artist Marcel Duchamp predicted that painting would eject all elements not intrinsic to its physical properties, and eventually die.
Illusionism was the first thing to go, as Picasso and Braque ejected proper perspective to view an object from every perspective simultaneously. But the tyranny of conceptual art devoid of actual concepts, which was the art of choice for decades, has been rejected by many as the soulless sham it is, saying nothing of substance, stirring no emotion save mild sadness at how superficial, banal and wasteful it all is.
This book is absolutely beautiful, one of my new favorites. It is, however, the third Glenn Brown book I've purchased, because they have yet to publish a comprehensive mid-career retrospective. At 150 pages, this book is by no means comprehensive, despite the $120.00 MSRP. But it is richly designed and constructed, with high-quality paper stock and changes at appropriate junctures. Instead of opting for two-page spreads that lose some of the image in the crease, they use gate-folds and half-folds, a much classier choice. This book will undoubtedly be hard to find soon, and the price will probably sky-rocket, so buy it while you can get it. If you like Glenn Brown enough to seek out other books, the monograph published by the Tate Gallery is another great book that focuses on many works not illustrated in this Rizzoli edition, and it also uses fold-outs for the larger works.

[Terence · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ok.