Brown's work is like a palimpsest of a copy, a further transformation of a subjectively selected cult of images. Brown finds one or two pictures, takes them apart, restructures them, draws a mood out of them and forms a new picture from the components.
"Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Dalí, Auerbach, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer," Lumu says on its website.
Glenn Brown: The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (1998)
"Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque, while heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat. Often placing formal and aesthetic concerns over original subject matter and meaning, details from well-known works are isolated, manipulated, becoming subject matters themselves."
The irony that directly connects the digital and traditional images that Brown uses is not so refined, but it still works. Still, something is missing from these highly worked and very effective canvases. Perhaps another kind of originality, not just that which connects the work to the artist. Brown puts contemporary painting on a new path by criticizing the means of perception and attacking traditional values, but he fails to offer an acceptable replacement.
The Ludwig Museum is the third stop for the exhibition. Earlier it was shown in Liverpool and Torino.
The exhibition can be seen in Budapest until April 11.
