- 210
Glenn Brown
Estimate
350,000 - 450,000 USD
bidding is closed
Description
- Glenn Brown
- Saturday Night Fever
- oil on canvas
- 31 by 38 in. 78.5 by 96.5 cm.
- Executed in 1992.
Provenance
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Minneapolis
Montgomery Glasoe Gallery, Minneapolis
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1996
Private Collection, Minneapolis
Montgomery Glasoe Gallery, Minneapolis
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1996
Exhibited
New York, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Painting Invitational, July 1993
Minneapolis, Walker Arts Center; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, Brilliant! New Art from London, October 1995 - January 1996, cat. no. 2
Hexam, Queen's Hall Arts Centre, Glenn Brown, 1996, p. 20, no. 2, illustrated in color
London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 24, illustrated in color
Minneapolis, Walker Arts Center; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, Brilliant! New Art from London, October 1995 - January 1996, cat. no. 2
Hexam, Queen's Hall Arts Centre, Glenn Brown, 1996, p. 20, no. 2, illustrated in color
London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 24, illustrated in color
Condition
This work is in excellent condition overall. The canvas is unlined. Close inspection reveals a short and stable hairline crack roughly ½ inch in length towards the center. Very close inspection under raking light shows some very minor variation in the varnish towards the upper corners, which is consistent with the artists working method and application. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
“In the ‘Auerbach’ and other portraits … my bodily involvement is as a voyeur. It sounds dreadful, but I am perhaps only here in spirit. I could partake in the pleasure of the paint, but I prefer the invisible hand of the dematerialized artist, making dematerialized fake brush marks.”
The artist cited in: Alison M Gingeras, ‘Guilty: The Work of Glenn Brown’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 16.
Betraying impassioned brushwork yet possessing a photographically unfocused and impossibly smooth painted surface, Glenn Brown’s Saturday Night Fever embodies the art of appropriation at its most haunting and extravagant. Executed in 1992, 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 Julia from 1980, the present work denotes the very 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, Rambrandt, Dalí, Willem de Kooning and Karel Appel. In the present early work after Auerbach, Brown’s most pivotal and immediately recognizable subject matter, a coloristic and technical mastery of paint forcefully delivers Glenn Brown’s essential artistic conceit. Hyped-up Technicolor and seductively flawless brushwork here revisits and recapitulates Auerbach’s vigorous original to deliver a cool critical dialogue that at once usurps authorial conventions and scrutinizes 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 (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 95). Indeed, though denounced for plagiarism during his Turner Prize nomination in 2000, Brown’s work supersedes mere quotation or straight imitation. Dodgy color 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.
Belonging to the very incipient handful of works after Auerbach this painting stands as one of the most faithful and subtle of Brown's transmutations by affecting an incredible sense of trompe-l'oeil when viewed first hand. In contrast to the overt and extreme transmutations of his later output, the central conceit here lies in a distortion of scale, focus and color palette. Brown has paraphrased with great accuracy every brushstroke, ridge of paint, highlight, and shadow achieved by Auerbach; however, with equal dexterity lens-blur and a distorted acidic tonality evocative of industrial four-color printing are here rendered and exaggerated. Against the brushstrokes blurred to convey a receding background, Brown's version of Julia eerily looms forward in a slick configuration of astringent and vivid color. Through Glenn Brown’s creative process, Julia is resurrected and bestowed new mutant life. The transformation from painting into reproduction back into paint utterly evacuates the primacy of Auerbach’s highly psychological rendering of human presence. In an act that invokes Mary Shelley’s paradigm of gothic horror, Glenn Brown takes on the role of Dr Frankenstein: his creations are the lugubrious products of extreme and suffocating self-referentiality.
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, Op. cit., p. 20). Entitled Saturday Night Fever, the present work at once alludes to the iconic 1970s film starring John Travolta - the famous actor's signature has since been autographed on the back of this painting at the request of the present owner - whilst simultaneously evoking associations of infection or malaise implicit within Glenn Brown's cannibalisticreconstruction of the original source painting. What's more, akin to the way in which fetishistic brushwork grafts new skin onto Auerbach’s Julia, Brown's nuanced titling confers a further, yet invisible epidermis of borrowed expression. Of pioneering importance for the artist’s mature output, Saturday Night Fever is a remarkably resolute and complex painting that evidences a masterful conceptual and painterly virtuosity from the very earliest moment of Brown's career.
The artist cited in: Alison M Gingeras, ‘Guilty: The Work of Glenn Brown’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 16.
Betraying impassioned brushwork yet possessing a photographically unfocused and impossibly smooth painted surface, Glenn Brown’s Saturday Night Fever embodies the art of appropriation at its most haunting and extravagant. Executed in 1992, 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 Julia from 1980, the present work denotes the very 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, Rambrandt, Dalí, Willem de Kooning and Karel Appel. In the present early work after Auerbach, Brown’s most pivotal and immediately recognizable subject matter, a coloristic and technical mastery of paint forcefully delivers Glenn Brown’s essential artistic conceit. Hyped-up Technicolor and seductively flawless brushwork here revisits and recapitulates Auerbach’s vigorous original to deliver a cool critical dialogue that at once usurps authorial conventions and scrutinizes 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 (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 95). Indeed, though denounced for plagiarism during his Turner Prize nomination in 2000, Brown’s work supersedes mere quotation or straight imitation. Dodgy color 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.
Belonging to the very incipient handful of works after Auerbach this painting stands as one of the most faithful and subtle of Brown's transmutations by affecting an incredible sense of trompe-l'oeil when viewed first hand. In contrast to the overt and extreme transmutations of his later output, the central conceit here lies in a distortion of scale, focus and color palette. Brown has paraphrased with great accuracy every brushstroke, ridge of paint, highlight, and shadow achieved by Auerbach; however, with equal dexterity lens-blur and a distorted acidic tonality evocative of industrial four-color printing are here rendered and exaggerated. Against the brushstrokes blurred to convey a receding background, Brown's version of Julia eerily looms forward in a slick configuration of astringent and vivid color. Through Glenn Brown’s creative process, Julia is resurrected and bestowed new mutant life. The transformation from painting into reproduction back into paint utterly evacuates the primacy of Auerbach’s highly psychological rendering of human presence. In an act that invokes Mary Shelley’s paradigm of gothic horror, Glenn Brown takes on the role of Dr Frankenstein: his creations are the lugubrious products of extreme and suffocating self-referentiality.
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, Op. cit., p. 20). Entitled Saturday Night Fever, the present work at once alludes to the iconic 1970s film starring John Travolta - the famous actor's signature has since been autographed on the back of this painting at the request of the present owner - whilst simultaneously evoking associations of infection or malaise implicit within Glenn Brown's cannibalisticreconstruction of the original source painting. What's more, akin to the way in which fetishistic brushwork grafts new skin onto Auerbach’s Julia, Brown's nuanced titling confers a further, yet invisible epidermis of borrowed expression. Of pioneering importance for the artist’s mature output, Saturday Night Fever is a remarkably resolute and complex painting that evidences a masterful conceptual and painterly virtuosity from the very earliest moment of Brown's career.