Glenn Brown

Brown often combines art history and personal cultural references in his epic virtuoso paintings, manipulating source material to uncanny effect. Music culture is also an inspiration for his work, and in this case the title refers to the cult American psychedelic-folk-rock musician Tim Buckley (1947 – 1975).

This painting is based on a small black and white etching by John Martin (1789-1854). The collection of figures that are the subject of the original have been removed in order to make the scene other-worldly and without a specific scale. The work is about texture and movement, solidity and translucency, disorientation and spectacle. First, the painting was executed entirely in brown paint, then the stronger, brighter colours were glazed over this ground, not unlike a hand-tinted black-and-white photograph. I wanted the reds to recede into the distance, and the blues and greens come to the forward - quite opposite of a traditional landscape painting.

- Glenn Brown, May 2018

Previous Exhibitions to which this work has been loaned include:

The Laughing Stock of the Heartless Stars, The Brown Collection, Marylebone, London, 2024
The Real Thing part 2 (retrospective), Landesmuseum, Hanover, Germany, 2023 (image below)
Glenn Brown: Fantasy Landscapes, Portraits and Beasts, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, United Kingdom, 2018
Beyond Reality, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, Czech Republic, 2012 (image below)
Glenn Brown (survey), Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary, 2010
Glenn Brown (survey), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy, 2009
Glenn Brown (survey), Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom, 2009