Glenn Brown

Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1997

Paris, Ghislaine Hussenot, 1997
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles, University of California, The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, Examining Pictures: Exhibiting Paintings, May 1999 - April 2000
Brittany, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, centre d'art contemporain, centre culturel de recontre, Glenn Brown, July - November 2000, cat. no. GB 40, p. 26, illustrated in color

This painting is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, as it were, and to be not quite of this world. I would like them to exist in a dream world, which I think of as being the place that they occupy, a world that is made up of the accumulation of images that we have stored in our subconscious, and that coagulate and mutate when we sleep.”
Glenn Brown quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Gagosian Gallery, Glenn Brown - Three Exhibitions, 2009, p.70

A sweeping hyper-realist vision of alien space that echoes the intimately familiar landscapes of the great Romantic tradition, and an epic example of Old Master virtuosity veiled under the glossy flatness of photographic reproduction, Glenn Brown’s stunning Towards an International Socialism (after "Icebergs in Space" 1989 by Chris Foss) is the definitive paragon of this Turner-prize nominee’s canon of post-modernist art and his most important work to appear at auction. By dramatically blowing-up Foss’ original illustration and painting it on a colossal scale, Brown has quoted various art historical sources, augmented visual details, altered textures and delivered a seamless reconfiguration of a science fiction illustration into a masterpiece that suspends all conventional conceptions of time, authorship and painterly expression. Completed in 1997 and exhibiting an intensity of unsurpassed technical and conceptual invention, the present work not only stands at the very apotheosis of the artist's extraordinary corpus of monumental sci-fi panoramas, but also ranks as perhaps the most iconic and mysterious work of Glenn Brown’s entire oeuvre.

The world of pioneering artist Chris Foss consists of giant mechanical structures floating in space, anthropomorphized computers and sparsely populated alien landscapes. Heavily featured on the covers of novels by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick, Foss’ illustrations have distilled the look of science fiction and the popular imagination of the future. In the present work Brown has appropriated the reproduction of Foss’ image, Icebergs in Space, yet brings a contemporary sensibility to the original. His technical virtuosity seamlessly blends together a radioactive palette, luminous sfumato and faux impasto brushwork, conferring an otherworldly Technicolor intensity that differs radically from the original. At the same time, by bestowing upon his paintings a simultaneous surface flatness and pictorial depth, Brown presents a convincing argument for the ability of painting to incorporate the hyper-real aesthetics of multi-media platforms, CGI and video game dialects that inform our quotidian reality today. Confounding Foss’ imagination with the sensibilities of a contemporary virtual world, Brown has found a renewed argument for Walter Benjamin’s postulation that the mechanical reproduction ultimately alters the original. Michael Stubbs argues that Brown’s works “are markers for the future of painting because they are both surface effect and material methodology, not despite of the screen but because of it.” (Exh. Cat., Tate Liverpool, Glenn Brown, 2009, p. 108) By expertly wielding an anachronistic Old Master technique, Brown painstakingly mimics the two-dimensional sheen of the photographic reproduction that elides any inference of human intervention. The mass proliferated image becomes the host through which Brown – the self-named Dr. Frankenstein of painting – splices, mutates and clones the already distorted replications of art in the past yet still produces works that are indisputably original and flamboyantly seductive.

Enormous and immersive, depicting a world where scale is disproportionate, gravity is supended, and reality is no longer as we know it, Towards an International Socialism (after "Icebergs in Space" 1989 by Chris Foss) is an ideal site to experience Brown’s labyrinth of time and space. One is never sure if we are looking at Foss’ 1970s vision of the future, or Brown’s vision of the past, or a pastiche of the past’s vision of the future or a futuristic rendering of a past vision. The perplexing irony of the title also adds to the temporal complexity inherent to the work. Confounding a telescopic view of the vastness of space and a close-up of a floating iceberg, Brown’s image is also quintessentially cinematic: the serene background exudes a sense of timelessness while the massive iceberg threatens to protrude outside the painting. The combined experience is akin to watching a fantastical film where the reality of the imagery becomes so absorbing that it starts to seem normal, just as Brown's work posits fundamental questions about the power of implied narrative.

Accompanying the expansion of Foss' image, Brown’s repertoire of art historical borrowings traces a lineage beginning with Rembrandt and the 19th Century Romantics such as Caspar David Friedrich, evolving through Salvador Dali right up to the thickly impastoed work of Willem de Kooning and Frank Auerbach. His act of appropriation, by no means uncontroversial, poses important questions of authorship and the undermining of originality and artistic aura. In this work, the enlargement in size is paralleled with enrichment in detail. The heightened marbling and the minute variances of color create an atmosphere that the original could not possibly rival: the distant space appears deeper; the iceberg is bathed in an eerie blue-white light, with every crack visible, every surface glistening with such vitality that imminent movement can be sensed. Just as in the photo-based paintings of Gerhard Richter, the original sources are fundamentally decontextualized, resituated and deconstructed.  Brown comments on his own painting process: “I’m rather like a Dr. Frankenstein, constructing paintings out of the residue or dead parts of other artist’s work. I hope to create a sense of strangeness by bringing together examples of the way the best historic and modern-day artists have depicted their personal sense of the world. ...Their sources of inspiration suggest things I would never normally see.” (in an interview with Rochelle Steiner in Exh. Cat., London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 96)

Brown’s reworking of the originals resides not only in detail, but also in structure. In this work, the floating iceberg is remarkably similar to the original yet the yellow spaceship so prominent in Foss’ work has been completely eradicated. The essential sci-fi elements – planets, stars and floating alien objects could only evoke the epithet sci-fi; when displaced, as occurs in Brown’s work, they remain no longer within the confines of sci-fi futuristic symbols. Instead, they become abstractions begging the more profound questions on the meaning of painting itself. For example, with dizzying hyper-precision, the artist renders the iceberg credible both as an alien planet and a microscopic crystalline object; the iceberg becomes an abstract idea through which the viewer contemplates scale, form and space, and as a consequence one’s own existential state. Brown ulimately delivers a subversive clash of the Romantic Sublime with populist Sci-Fi, thus bridging the historical and temporal gap between these two ostensibly disparate yet related visual world.