Glenn Brown

Patrick Painter, Inc., Santa Monica
Private Collection, New York
Sotheby's, New York, November 15, 2007, lot 411
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Exh. Cat., Bignan, France, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Glenn Brown, 2000, p. 34, illustrated in color

This work appears in excellent overall condition. The surface is bright, clean and fresh. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. Under ultra violet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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Incited by the vanguard of Appropriation Art, Glenn Brown's quintessentially post-modern approach to painting borrows images from a diverse range of visual sources, both historic and current, and repaints them in a manner entirely his own.  Confronted by a pronounced prejudice against the perceived antiquated nature of painting in the early 1990s, Brown "tried to answer that problem by making a painting of a painting," (Glenn Brown interview with David Trigg, 'Painting Paintings', Art Monthly, no. 325, April 2009). The Sailors Wife, 1998, pays homage to and departs from Frank Auerbach's heavily impastoed portrait, J.Y.M Seated, 1996. His radical trompe l'oeil approach entails the manual manipulation, distortion and rotation of the thick ridges and labyrinth of drips in Auerbach's heavily textured surfaces, rendering them in minute detail on flawlessly flat, highly polished, almost photographic surfaces. As he went on to elaborate, "I prefer the invisible hand of the dematerialised artist, making dematerialised fake brush marks [author's emphasis]. I looked at the history of painting and couldn't see why expression should be aligned only with the brush mark," (Glenn Brown interview with Sabine Folie, in A. Gingeras 'Guilty: The Work of Glenn Brown', Rochelle Steiner et al. (eds.), Glenn Brown, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 2004, pp. 16-17). 

By removing the brushmark, Brown negates the mythical act of the heroic artist with a brush in hand, exposing nothing but an illusion. He explains, "I fetishise the brushmark, and treat them like objects to be gazed at in awe, eventually to be mocked." Entitled after Lewis Carroll's lamenting nineteenth century eponymous poem, Brown injects the portrait with the emotional anguish of a wife, longing for her husband adrift at sea. Transforming Auerbach's austere palette of warm ochre and earth tones to a vibrant cacophony of painstakingly applied blues, greens, violets and yellows, Brown manipulates the inherently serious mood of the painting, underlining the fundamental artifice of painting and challenging the Modernist obsession with the impassioned painterly gesture. In an age where painterly style has become tainted by the prevalence of new media, the present work is compelling in its technical precision, where illusionism is so visually credible. Establishing a new chapter in the history of the brushstroke in art, Brown secures his place in the canon of Appropriation artistry.