Glenn Brown

"I am a little bit like Doctor Frankenstein because I create my pictures with the remains and dead parts of other artists' works." So says the rising London painter, Glenn Brown, while essayist Tom Morton likens Brown's canvases to a zombie comedy. Thus, "Theater" is a half-length portrait of a skeleton whose bones resemble a slimy organic mass of meat, paste and raspberry ice cream, while the sad mutant heads in "Asylums of Mars" and "The Hinterland" look as if they were bred in a mad geneticist's laboratory. In this monograph, six recent works are presented on deluxe tipped-in color plates, each accompanied by a detail that reveals Brown's technique: the artist fills his grounds with flowing whirlpools of shifting colors--but what initially look like thick brushstrokes are revealed upon closer examination to be very thin layers of paint that could almost be mistaken for photographs or digitally manipulated prints.