Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown (b. 1966)

Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 2; Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 4; Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 5; Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 6; Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 7; and Layered Portrait (after Lucian Freud) 9, 2008

Etchings

Each sheet: 39 × 31 ⅛ inches

Printed by Paupers Press, London

Published by Karsten Schubert, London

Edition: 30

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I never want to lose that notion of appropriation—people say to me, sooner or later you’ll stop copying other artists but...I never thought you ever could. The work is always going to be based on something, and I wanted to make the relationship with art history as obvious as possible. Again, I think it increases the intensity of the way that people look at things.

— GLENN BROWN, interviewed by Art in America

Glenn Brown sources his images from the internet, books, and other printed materials, infusing older works with new meaning and relevance. These etchings derive from images of etchings by the twentieth-century artist Lucian Freud. Brown began first by scanning Freud’s portraits and figure studies found in exhibition catalogues. Digitally manipulating the scans, Brown superimposed several images on top of one another and then created etching plates from the image files. Each sheet was printed from multiple etching plates, resulting in a composite of up to sixteen Freuds in a single print. The project expresses Brown’s ambivalence to Freud: by copying, altering, and densely accumulating information, he simultaneously proclaims and erases Freud’s originals. Brown also made Layered Portraits by scanning and manipulating prints by Rembrandt and Urs Graf. In all these works, the printed book—a medium for shaping art history and taste—is as much the subject of Brown’s inquiry as these celebrated masters.

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