An eerie chill falls over the work, its virtuosic execution expelling the thought and feeling of Auerbach’s original in a spectacle of sublime, grandiose superficiality. Neither abstract nor representational in any orthodox sense, this is no longer a work of passionate subjective statement but a calculated degrading of the painterly gesture into an arbitrary, repeatable cipher. Every trace of Auerbach’s brush is carefully, clinically replicated. Cropping to the subject’s head, the brushstrokes of Auerbach’s intensely felt portrait are painstakingly reproduced Julia Yardley Mills’ face is nearly lost in slick, volcanic striations, and a precisely muddied background of swirling polychrome pigment gleams with unnerving flatness. Working from a poor-quality printed reproduction of the earlier work, Brown’s version has become smooth and glacial. The two artists’ intentions and handling of paint could hardly be more different: Auerbach’s thick, emotive impasto is rendered utterly flat through Brown’s precise photorealism, which radically undermines our psychological and technical expectations of what painting should do. Brown casts a cold postmodern eye over the modernist belief in authentic expression, meticulously copying and enlarging a reproduction of Frank Auerbach’s Head of J.Y.M.

It’s almost as if I’m shut in Plato’s cave, seeing the world in the shadows on the walls – the shadows being my library of second-hand images and the cave being my studio, I suppose’Ī display of astounding technical splendour and compelling conceptual depth, Glenn Brown’s The Creeping Flesh is an enthralling example of the artist’s unique painterly practice. ‘I like the sense of claustrophobia that results from sticking fairly closely to art history.

Glenn brown artwork