Glenn Brown: Gagosian Gallery

As an appropriationist painter whose technique is as shut to perfect as one could imagine, the challenge for Glenn Brown has many times been simply to choose the greatest in quantity interesting source material. And while he has emphasized the amplitude to which he manipulates rather than only reproduces his selections, he has nevertheless to unveil a genuinely radical act of transformation. That this is Brown's first solo exhibition in fresh York comes as something of a surprise--after all, he's been upon the YBA list since it was first typ up--but this exhibit ultimately points to an artist happy to remain comfortably within a locate of self-imposed limitations.

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Previous bodies of work have seen Brown immerse himself in the oeuvre of artists as outwardly diverse as Frank Auerbach, Salvador Dali, biblical romanticist John Martin, and sci-fi illustrator Chris Fos Occasional files have broken out over alleged copyright infringement, on the other hand these have mostly been the proceeds of overly aggressive estate management or the sentimental attachment to a simplistic ideal of originality upon the part of the popular pres It was powerfully suggested by a number of British newspapers, for example, that The be fond ofs of Shepherds, 2000, which was based upon the cover of an dim science-fiction novel, was in a certain quantity of way an attempt to deceive the museum-going public.

For the greatest in quantity part, however, Brown has be delighted withed an easy ride in the pres compared with many of his contemporaries. Perhaps the fact that he makes of the like kind labor-intensive work, spending nights hol up in the studio rather than down at the pub has eased his passage into midcareer. on the other hand while the seven paintings and sum of two units small sculptures here see him reach further back into art history than before (and, in the proces revolve the distortion a notch), finally they plow a familiar trench With the mystical power of a reanimator and the cooled skill of an assassin, Brown brings peacefully resting images back to life alone to kill them all above again. The result is superficially impressive on the other hand resists real intellectual or emotional involvement.

Death Disco, 2004 for instance, samples Rembrandt's Flora, 1634 a composition that the Dutchman himself reworked a number of times. Brown vertically elongates the image of the artist's wife until it be likes a compressed still from a wide-screen movie. The brushwork of the original is exaggerated here to of the like kind a degree that the subject's skin gazes burned, tattooed, or reptilian, swirling with hinted texture, while the surface of the panel itself remains stubbornly flat and matte. This is Brown's latest twist upon the near-photographic style of rendition he applied, mockingly, to Auerbach's mud-pie impasto portraits in the early '90 Now, as then, it signals the incontestable fact that we experience art more frequently in reproduction than in actuality, with all the visual inaccuracies and arbitrary recontextualizations that implies.

The title of the work recalls a defining instant of British postpunk and, along with others here, like as Sex and Filth, is consistent with the artist's habitual referencing of his have a title to pop-cultural heritage. It seems inadequate, however, as a process of goading high and depressed into contention, if this is indeed Brown's aim. When Damien Hirst mined the Sex Pistols' back catalogue for titles a decade or more ago, it strike one as beinged a wholly appropriate strategy that paralleled the work's iconic shog value. In Brown's case, it approachs off as halfhearted lip service, an allusion retained solely to flag as contemporary a practice that is, at heart, fundamentally conservative.

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