Glenn Brown calls himself a painter and does not regard himself as an artist. One is a figure in a billowing green smock falling headlong into the white of the gallery walls, his or her skirts playing host to a mischevious and grinning gappy-toothed skull. There are a few mishapen canvases in this show which are figures cut loose and mounted almost as three-dimensional pieces. His historical figures, by contrast, often hover in blank voids unbroken only by a few streaks of awkwardly unblended paint. Spatially, the science fiction paintings show a love and a care bestowed on realising an unreal world. For they seem to exemplify best the questions Brown poses about constructed worlds and about our beliefs in how much they contain. It’s a shame that in this show there are none of his huge, sweeping, science fiction paintings which are very close copies of paintings by genre artists (such as the ‘The Loves of Shepherds’, infamous during Brown’s nomination for the 2000 Turner Prize for being a direct lift from the painting ‘ Doublestar’ by Tony Roberts). The painting mimics the glossiness of a magazine page but yet from the mad, thick strands of paint you would have to come up close to guess their flatness. It takes a never-ending, paddling step into the big ‘out there’ of deep space and time.ĭepth and trickery. The painting used to advertise the show, ‘War in Peace’ (2009), is of a large, blue decaying foot depicted as if the viewer were the owner of that foot. The tension in the paintings comes from a feeling of arrest in our perception of a mind at work identifying the sources that have been ground down to create an illusion of new-ness. They are rather hysterical, between ghosts and flesh and unravelling balls of polychrome wool.

The women and children are replicates of the pillowy marshmallow people that inhabit the world of c18th French painting. Stand-ins twice removed from where real people once where.

The new collection of paintings and occasional sculpture in Glenn Brown’s show are peopled by bookmarks of art history. Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street Oct 15 – Nov 27 2009 The Debaser – New Work by painter Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown by Glenn Brown