Glenn Brown

Todd Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1992

"In Brown's hands, Auerbach's vigorous brushstrokes and thick impasto - intended to convey the sitter's strong physicality and the character of the artist/model relationship - are quietly muffled to create a completely smooth, illusionistic rendering of the source works' drama-laden materiality."

Alison, M. Gingeras in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 15

Specifically chosen by Glenn Brown to introduce his very first major exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 2004, Atom Age Vampire represents the genesis of Brown's engagement with canonical works from art history, and more specifically, the highly celebrated and substantial body of work after Frank Auerbach. Painted in 1991 Atom Age Vampire is the original and pioneering translation after Auerbach's 1973, Head of J.Y.M - a painterly extraction and transmutation which has proven the most enduring artistic dialogue of his career to date. Here, the masterful flattening of Auerbach's expressionistic and sculptural gesture pinpoints the very beginning of a trans-historical dialogue with icons of art history: Atom Age Vampire is the breakthrough work which launched the corpus of paintings after Fragonard, Dalí, Rembrandt, Willem de Kooning, and Karel Appel that would come to constitute the mainstay of Brown's virtuoso artistic vocabulary. Pivotally important, Atom Age Vampire heralds the inauguration of Glenn Brown's principle subject matter.

The epitome of postmodern expression in paint, Brown's practice is embroiled in a complex negotiation between mechanical reproduction, artistic translation, and authorial detachment. Denounced for plagiarism during his Turner Prize exhibition in 2000, Brown takes his cue from Appropriation Art, and yet, his paintings are far from mere quotations or straight copies. Passed through a hyperrealist prism, extravagant brush marks are meticulously paraphrased, colours are distorted, and texture is rendered flat, while composition is often skewed and turned upside-down. In contrast to Auerbach's energetic application and gouging removal of paint to render his subject, Brown mimics and yet flattens the vigorous brushstrokes by measuredly working across every centimetre of the picture's surface: with tiny brushes, detail, colour and composition are systematically painted from left to right.

Fascinated by the inaccuracies that occur in photographic reproduction, Brown embraces and hones in on the distortions that occur in the mechanical printing process. For Atom Age Vampire, Brown worked from a version of the original Head of J.Y.M. found in a book that was "so old, discoloured and blurred" that it allowed him to "stretch tilt and alter the composition and colour in seeming infinite ways" (the artist cited in: Jennifer Higgie, 'He Paints Paint', Parkett 75, 2005). Nonetheless, as the precedent and very first version after Auerbach's 1973 J.Y.M. this painting stands as one of the most faithful of Brown's transmutations, affecting a real sense of tromp-l'oeil when viewed first hand. Roughly double the size of Auerbach's original, Brown misleads the viewer's preconception of pictorial verisimilitude in the act of appropriative consumption. Indeed, Atom Age Vampire stands as the cannibalistic progeny of Brown's ingestion of Auerbach's painting. The acidity and glossiness of Brown's painted surface emits an abjectly oozing-toxicity that posits his creation as an art-historical Frankenstein's monster.

In Brown's hands, the shell of impassioned mark-making has taken on a mutant 'undead' life; revivified yet inanimately flattened into a gruesome mask of expressionistic brushstrokes, this painting evokes a symbiosis with the genre of horror - a dialogue furthermore propounded by Brown's apt choice of title, Atom Age Vampire. In referencing the title of Anton Giulio Maiano's cult 1960s sci-fi/horror movie, Brown invokes distinct parallels with the central plot line. The film follows the story of a beautiful woman who, disfigured in a car accident, enlists the help of surgeon to restore her looks. The insalubrious method by which her beauty is restored necessitates glands extracted from the bodies of other women; the doctor harvests these organs from the victims of his murderous rampages during which he turns into a hideous monster. Echoing the central conceit of this film, the paintings of Glenn Brown, as explicated by Francesco Bonami, "are attempts to bring back to life - or at least to a facsimilie of life, like the work of a taxidermist - the masterpieces of the past. But the experiment never works and the paintings decay in the process of coming alive" (Francesco Bonami, 'Paintophagia', Exhibition Catalogue, Liverpool, Tate Liverpool, Glenn Brown, 2009, p. 72).

Representing a breakthrough moment, Atom Age Vampire is a remarkably resolute and complex painting that evidences a masterful conceptual and painterly virtuosity from the very earliest moment of Brown's career. A work of singular importance and unassailable consequence in steering the course of his production, this painting represents the very origin of Glenn Brown's incredible painterly vision.