The title of Im Gestein (2019–21)-in English, “in the rocks”-refers to a section of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, a musical composition forever linked to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001 (1968). The painting takes its title from Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands that was the site of multiple US nuclear tests, while the composition refers to drawings by Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787) and Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530). In Bikini (2022), a female and a male face are combined, Januslike, yet tug painfully in opposite directions, woven together by undulating colored strands. The work still hinges on art history and maintains his characteristic surrealist-symbolist look, but now Brown’s marks are bigger and bolder and his colors more fantastical, making every rendering intensely graphic and charged with accelerated motion. The artist’s exacting mark making, which produces intricate loops and swirls of paint that appear to glide and float across the canvases’ surfaces, infuses these works with an ethereal vitality.Īfter his last New York exhibition in 2014, Brown spent time concentrating exclusively on drawing, describing it as “the skeleton that holds the composition of any painting together.” In this exhibition, the technique becomes his starting point each painting is based on an appropriated drawing. The new paintings on view in New York include double portraits, twisted figures, and a large-scale still life with ripened quinces.

By harnessing the lingering allure and historical resonance of old master drawings, he transforms their past imagery into something rich and strange. Wielding a broad knowledge of art history, literature, music, and popular culture, Brown creates images and forms in which divergent references collide and playfully coexist.

Glenn brown collection