"I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, to be not q
uite of this world. For
me they exist in a dream world, a world that is made up of all
the accumulated
images stored in our subconscious that coagulate and mutate whe
n we sleep."
—
Glenn Brown
Glenn Brown has spent the last four decades developing a practi
ce that evades
contemporary labels. While often referred to as a photorealist
or a member of
the Young British Artists generation, Brown could be considered
a successor to
the likes of Francis Bacon or Frank Auerbach, mining artistic t
r
aditions and
bestowing attention to the materiality of paint. Like the forme
r, Brown often uses
pr
inted reproductions as source imagery, taken from art history b
ooks, science
fiction paperbacks, and the internet.
In Wild Horses (2007), the painting’s female subject assumes an
upward-gazing
postur
e often found in devotional representations of the Virgin Mary
and later
eighteenth-century idyll portraits of young shepherdesses; the
present
composition is after Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s oval tondo painting
Innocence (c.
1790) in the Wallace Collection, London. While based in traditi
onal subject
matter, Br
own’s coloration of the composition and his vibrant networ
k of trompe
l’oeil brushstrokes create a surreal inversion of realistic fig
uration, distor
ting the
perceived iconography. In addition to casting the female figure
and lamb in a
gr
een and red color palette often associated with artists such as
the German
Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Brown has long been influe
nced by the
br
ushwor
k of masters from Raphael and Jean-Honoré Fragonard to Auerbac
h
and Karel Appel, stating: “I fetishize the brushmark, and treat
brushmar
ks like
objects to be gazed at in awe.” Curator Christoph Grunenberg ob
serves that a
distancing takes place in Brown’s work; in Wild Horses, both co
rporeality and the
genre of portraiture are threatened by an “emphasis on literal,
formal
superficiality.” For the artist, however, it is a kind of super
ficiality inherited fr
om
Surrealists like Salvador Dalí, who utilized a literal, realist
ic mode of
representation to engender powerful and fantastical imagery.