Tate Liverpool

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool 

Tate Liverpool and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin present a major retrospective of the work of Glenn Brown. The exhibition opens today at Tate Liverpool and will run from 28 May until 4 October 2009 in Turin. 

One of the most revered painters of his generation, this exhibition will bring together the largest selection of the artist's work to date. Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Auerbach, Dalí, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer. 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 putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque and heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat.

The exhibition, which includes over fifty paintings, sculpture and several new works, is arranged to reveal the artist's diverse painterly strategies and preoccupations.