Glenn Brown

Gagosian Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2010

London, Gagosian Gallery, Glenn Brown: Three Exhibitions, 2009, p. 55, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a minute nick towards the centre of the extreme left edge. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra violet light.
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Painted in 2009, Soul Disco Ambient Funk exhibits the height of Glenn Brown’s virtuosic command of trompe l’oeil illusionism. Executed in an acidic palette of toxic greens and yellows merging into electric blue and red, this piece is one of the most abstract from Brown’s oeuvre, which since the early 1990s has been concerned with the abduction of existing artworks and their metamorphosis into a pantheon of mutated hostages. Here, the masterful cropping, zooming in on, and flattening of a painting by British master Frank Auerbach – a painterly extraction and transmutation which has proven to be the most enduring artistic dialogue of Brown’s career – pinpoints a trans-historical dialogue with icons of art history. Soul Disco Ambient Funk thus stands among the celebrated opus of paintings after masterworks by Fragonard, Dalí, Rembrandt, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, and Francis Bacon that constitute the mainstay of Brown’s bravura artistic vocabulary.

Akin to Gerhard Richter before him, Brown explores the validity of painting in despite of, and dependent upon, a visual culture mediated by mass reproduction and the possibility of infinite replication. Taking his cue from 1980s appropriation art, Brown represents the next step in the dialogue between photography, painting and post-modern quotation. In the present work Auerbach’s impassioned brush strokes have been emptied of their spontaneous power via a meticulous execution in which every centimetre of the picture’s surface is worked across with microscopic intensity. As demonstrated by the lusciously slick appearance of Soul Disco Ambient Funk, Brown paints photographs of paintings, and in so doing, looks to simulate the appearance of the photographic print. The discrepancies imparted by four stages of transformation – from the work of art, to the photographic reproduction, its digital distortion, and its transformation back into oil paint – provide the margin for Brown’s own creative and conceptual intervention. Here, Brown has elongated, flipped back to front and cropped a painting by Auerbach to produce the initial image for Soul Disco Ambient Funk.

Brown’s choice of title adds a further layer of intervention and appropriative meaning. Once again subverting authorial conventions, these names are adopted second-hand from a range of cultural sources ranging from Victorian euphemisms to popular music or zombie horror films. Soul Disco Ambient Funk, akin to many of the works created in recent years, refers more explicitly to the influence of music during the act of painting. 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, ‘Guilty: The Work of Glenn Brown’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, 2004, p. 20). Akin to the way in which fetishistic brushwork grafts new skin onto Auerbach’s painting, Brown’s nuanced titling confers a further, yet invisible epidermis of borrowed expression. Indeed, contrary to superficial interpretation, Brown’s work ventures beyond mere trompe l’oeil.