Paintings

The subject matter in Glenn Brown‘s paintings ranges from his early science-fiction landscapes over abstract compositions and still lives to the figurative images based on art historical references. Most paintings share a morbid, almost creepy atmosphere, which is especially underlined by the incorporation of certain unsightly physical features of his figures such as yellowish decaying teeth, translucently white blind-looking eyeballs, unnatural skin colours and suggestions of foulness and smell emanating from figures' bodies. Brown: "I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, as it were, and to be not quite of this world. I would like them to exist in a dream world, which I think of as being the place that they occupy, a world that is made up of the accumulation of images that we have stored in our subconscious, and that coagulate and mutate when we sleep." Many of Brown‘s portraits depict amorphous beings that have been described as "tumurous lumps that look like outsized, inflamed organs". Often they are ironically attributed with recurring features such as flowers growing out of their compost-like bodies, hallows placed over heads or red noses. In few of these amorphous and abstract forms, female figures are embedded within the mottling masses of unidentifiable matter

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