Brown mines art history from the Renaissance to the present, transforming divergent imagery from across centuries through intricate line and pattern, elaborate gestures, and a heightened palette. Reinterpreting his pictorial sources by distorting human anatomy and other natural forms, his works are at once sensuous, alluring, and grotesque. Bringing together new paintings, drawings, and a sculpture with Brown’s works from the past three decades, the presentation at Frieze Masters also includes historical works on paper from the Brown Collection.

In So We Drove On Towards Death in the Cooling Twilight (2025), Brown took inspiration from a drawing of an old, gnarled tree by Dutch artist Abraham Bloemaert (1566–1651), an accomplished painter and printmaker who was a vital figure in the development of Dutch landscape art. A related work on paper by Bloemaert is also included in the display. To create this painting, Brown adjusted the proportions of the old master’s composition, transforming the textures of the tree’s bark and foliage into elaborate linear patterns in a palette of orange tones on a complementary blue ground. The work’s title is derived from a fatalistic line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925).

To produce Swig (2025), Brown began by acquiring a neoclassical marble sculpture of a figure holding fruit, a traditional symbol of fertility and abundance. Brown then covered the head, shoulders, and side of the statue with highly textured accumulations of oil paint that match the off-white tones of the marble and contain blooms of blue and yellow, creating jarring contrasts with the delicately modeled drapery and limbs. Adapting Brown’s strategies of appropriation and transformation to sculpture, this work short-circuits Renaissance notions of paragone, the historic debate regarding the essential characteristics of painting and sculpture.

Hendrick Goltzius (1588–1617) was a leading printmaker of the early Baroque era in the Netherlands. His technically masterful engraving of Christ’s body on his mother’s lap recalls Michelangelo’s famed marble Pietà (1498–99) in St. Peter’s Basilica, which Goltzius had seen when visiting Rome in 1590. Stylistically, Goltzius took inspiration from Albrecht Dürer in his detailed rendering of anatomy, the figures’ incorporation into the landscape, and the use of radiating lines that gather to form halos around their heads.

Rabbit Hole (2025) is inspired by a chalk drawing by Dutch artist Jan Van Noordt (1623/4–after 1676), a contemporary of Rembrandt. Van Noordt’s naturalistic drawing of a seated female nude in a modest pose is a study for his painting of Susanna, a Biblical subject who was spied upon while bathing by two lecherous older men. Brown interprets Van Noordt’s drawing, here rendering the figure with delicate contours and volumetric modeling, meshing her figure with doubled and inverted versions of her body.

Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways (1995) appropriates A Boy as Pierrot (1785), a painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732–1806) in London’s Wallace Collection. A young boy wearing an oversize theatrical costume of the popular commedia dell’arte character, Fragonard’s cherubic subject is painted with loose brushstrokes in pastel shades, which Brown has interpreted using a more saturated palette. The inversion of the composition nods to the work of contemporary German painter Georg Baselitz (born 1938), who combines a mode of abstraction with expressive figuration, also implying the disorientation of a world turned upside down. The title of Brown’s painting is drawn from the lyrics of the driving, melancholy track “These Days” (1980) by foundational post-punk band Joy Division.