Glenn Brown

Art, to me, has never felt like a description of reality. It is always about getting some internal understanding of reality out.
—Glenn Brown

Gagosian is pleased to present We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent, an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures, and drawings by Glenn Brown.

Wielding a broad knowledge of art history, literature, music, and popular culture, Brown creates images and forms in which divergent references collide and playfully coexist. By harnessing the lingering allure and historical resonance of old master drawings, he transforms their past imagery into something rich and strange. The new paintings on view in New York include double portraits, twisted figures, and a large-scale still life with ripened quinces. The artist’s exacting mark making, which produces intricate loops and swirls of paint that appear to glide and float across the canvases’ surfaces, infuses these works with an ethereal vitality.

After his last New York exhibition in 2014, Brown spent time concentrating exclusively on drawing, describing it as “the skeleton that holds the composition of any painting together.” In this exhibition, the technique becomes his starting point; each painting is based on an appropriated drawing. The work still hinges on art history and maintains his characteristic surrealist-symbolist look, but now Brown’s marks are bigger and bolder and his colors more fantastical, making every rendering intensely graphic and charged with accelerated motion.