Exhibited in Glenn Brown’s Tate exhibition in 2009, as well as in the exhibition for his Turner Prize nomination in 2000, The Real Thing is a prime exemplar of this artist’s extraordinary painterly practice. Betraying impassioned brushwork yet possessing a photographically unfocused and impossibly smooth painted surface, this work embodies the art of appropriation at its most haunting and extravagant. Executed in 2000, this painting belongs among the pioneering examples from Brown’s iconic and celebrated corpus after the renowned School of London artist Frank Auerbach. Based on Auerbach’s Head of J.Y.M. from 1973, the present work denotes the genesis of Brown’s critical painterly dialogue with canonical works from art history – an acclaimed trans-historical corpus that has since consumed and reformulated iconic works by Fragonard, El Greco, Rembrandt, Dalí, and de Kooning. In the present work after Auerbach, Brown’s most pivotal and immediately recognisable subject matter, a colouristic and technical mastery of paint forcefully delivers Brown’s essential artistic conceit. Hyped-up Technicolor and seductively flawless brushwork here revisit and recapitulate Auerbach’s vigorous original to deliver a cool critical dialogue that at once usurps authorial conventions and scrutinises our twenty-first century relationship with art history.

Fundamentally Glenn Brown is a painter of paintings: his works intervene and distort the canon of art history by directly employing the terms of our contemporary experience of it – a visual encounter that today is utterly mediated by the ubiquitous reproduction. Crucially it is the inconsistency of the mass-produced facsimile made abundant in art books, catalogues and infinitely replicated within the fathomless hyperspace of the computer screen that provides Brown with his primary entry point. Instead of drawing from the original, Brown’s imagination is fired by “the somewhat sad reproduction” for its pictorial deficiency (Glenn Brown quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 95). Indeed, though accused of plagiarism during his Turner Prize nomination in 2000, Brown’s work supersedes mere quotation or straight imitation. Dodgy colour levels, blurred or manipulated photography and distortive scaling form his point of departure; the mass proliferated image becomes the host through which Brown clones, distorts and even mutates the already flawed art historical replicant.

Exuding a remarkable and even retrogressive Old Master painterly virtuosity, the very essence of Brown’s practice is unassailably embroiled in the elitism of painting’s history. Nonetheless, as the title of the present work underlines, high art coalesces with an elevation of the low. References to popular music and film proliferate in Brown’s ostensibly incongruous titling. Often these reflect the particular moment or mood accompanying the work’s creation, more so however, as articulated by Alison M. Gingeras, “they provide a doorway for the viewer to access the otherwise hermetic and obscure universe of the visual references in his work… while they might not be descriptive, his titles open up the possibility of projecting narrative content onto his work” (Alison M. Gingeras, Ibid., p. 20). Entitled The Real Thing, the present work most likely refers to the UK band from the 1970s who produced such international hits as ‘You to Me are Everything’, and yet, in the context of Brown, whose work has cannibalised and subverted painterly precedent, this title also raises pertinent questions about authenticity and authorship. Brown asserts his work not as a copy after Auerbach, but rather as an object of, and unto, itself.

The Real Thing is a remarkably resolute and complex painting that evidences a masterful conceptual and painterly virtuosity from the very earliest moment of Brown's career. Its exhibition history pays tribute to its importance within the artist’s oeuvre. In its appreciation, we are reminded of curator Francesco Bonami’s statement: “The greatness of Glenn Brown’s work is its ability to tell us of the endless mutation of the history of painting, its decay and resurrection, its capacity to remain young when all around is getting older and older. Through a sophisticated nip/tuck job Glenn Brown makes a new series of masterpieces out of the aging ones. We love them; we fear them” (Francesco Bonami, ‘Paintophagia: The work of art in the age of manual production of technical reproduction’, in: Exh. Cat., Tate Liverpool, Glenn Brown, London 2009, p. 73).