Color seems to be the decisive factor here, giving each work its own pitch. It is interesting how different the temperaments of the individual works are – ranging from light and airy, to melancholic or tormented – while sharing the same compositional principles. Looking for meaning here feels like a game of a hide-and-seek, in which everything is curling and swirling, in which figures are appearing and disappearing, and the image never comes to rest.

In Brown’s case, there are many distractions to look at, and the viewer might wonder if there is a point at which everything comes together. There is no way to find what you are looking for without passing a variety of other offers that call for your attention.

Some shops make customers go through their offer in just such a prescribed way. Seeing these works, I wondered if the artist considered a path through each of them, in terms of where to start looking, where to continue, and where to leave the painting. He uses them to shape his figures, serving representation, but he also lets them shine as free-moving ornaments in a rich display of color and paint. For the current exhibition Brown was apparently triggered by the multitude of curving, shorter and longer lines that can be found in drawings. Sometimes they are intentionally meant as eyes, but they are often just blinking moments that draw the attention into the dense figuration, creating anchor points in what seems an overwhelming and cluttered play of lines and colors around a human figure. It is full of proud beauty, carefully orchestrated colors, and within the repeating patterns there are many little “eyes” hidden in the paint, in curving lines. Seeing a painting by Glenn Brown is like watching a peacock opening its tail. Brown usually prefers not to disclose the names of his sources, unless of course they are mentioned in the title), but it also references the artist’s own previous work. This piece is based on works by two 17 th– and 18 th-century artists (Mr. Multiple sources often come together in one painting, such as in the green Bring on the Headless Horses (2020), which projects a seated nude over a Hercules figure, intertwining them. For his exhibition And thus we existed, the artist presents 17 recent paintings that are loosely based on historical figure drawings, alongside six paint-based sculptures. Since his appearance on the 1990’s London art scene, Glenn Brown has been in an ongoing dialogue with his predecessors, without being afraid of mutilating his examples or pushing aspects of their work to the limits through stylish deviation and exaggeration.

Glenn brown paintings