Glenn Brown in Bath: Grottoesque and Arrows of Desire

Speaking at the openings of his two exhibitions in Bath last Friday, it was clear how much Glenn Brown had relished the invitations to show there that had, apparently, arisen quite independently. An affinity with the austerity of the town’s Georgian architecture is something that dates back to Brown’s time studying there in the 80s; coupled with this was the pleasure of being able to show his own work alongside the Holburne Museum’s important collection of 18th century English and Dutch painting.

Appropriation has always been Brown’s modus operandi – from the late 1980s he borrowed images from Frank Auerbach, or the illustrator of sci-fi novels, Chris Foss – transposing the work with distortions of his own, such as rendering Auerbach’s famous impasto in ultra-flat, hyperrealist form. Over the intervening years that practice has evolved into an even deeper knowledge of historical painting, particularly the baroque, a period which appeals for its combination of romanticism and the grotesque. Brown’s scholarship has also developed into a passion for collecting, and at his London gallery, the Brown Collection, he shows his own work in combination with original works by Bloemaert and Tiepolo, for example, or perhaps lesser-known 20th century figures such as Austin Osman Spare and Hans Bellmer. Brown’s appropriations are playful in the way that a poltergeist is playful: they are dangerous-feeling, uncanny, impossible to fully apprehend. His sulphurous palette and swirling, vaporous compositions seem to seethe underneath the satiny, meniscus-taut surface of the paintings.

At No.1 Royal Crescent Brown is debuting a new suite of three paintings that he has made for the shell grotto he has constructed at his Suffolk home. Monumental in scale they are presented in bespoke frames decorated with seashells, against a dark wallpaper also designed by the artist. The flickering light from wall sconces made of scallop shells added to the sense of being in a cave, even on a brilliantly sunny day. There is a kind of textural rhyming between the encrusted frames and the squirming mass of marks which coalesce to form the faces of each painting. Two of the paintings feature double-headed subjects, as if describing psychological states. In Suffolk Grotto Painting (Centre), 2026 male and female heads are conjoined in what, on closer inspection looks like a congealed, fibrous mass. In the newer works here, and at the Holburne Museum, while the outline or profiles of the figures might initially read as youthful, there are small, dark apertures into the volumes of the head that suggest decay and disintegration. A sense of instability is everywhere.

At Royal Crescent there is an emphasis on the natural world with a group of Brown’s exquisite renderings of gnarled trees that take on more than a little anthropomorphic qualities. An element of the distortions that the artist brings to his borrowings lies in the titles he gives to works: his painting on panel of a sinewy, leafless tree trunk is entitled The Joy of Sex, leaving the viewer floundering about trying to figure out the connection. In the wonderfully named Saint Bimbo, 2024/25 what looks like it could be a mangelwurzel reclines on a stone ledge, its twisting, hairy roots like so many fleshy little thighs waving into the shadowy air.

Across town at the Holburne Museum, it is the human figure that predominates. On the grand staircase up to the first floor galleries, a cherubic head hurtles, disembodied, down towards you. Golden curls fly against a brooding sky; above rounded baby cheeks a sinister void where the child’s right eye should be. The painting sits in a slim, gilt frame with rounded corners that, now I look at it again, echoes the screen of my iPhone and reminds that Brown routinely uses Photoshop and other programmes as part of his process of appropriating images and making them his own. At the entrance to the exhibition is a work based on a drawing of the twelve-year old Christ by Albrecht Durer. Brown has superimposed a grey rectangle at the bottom of the composition, evoking the conventions of cartoon strips and inviting the audience to insert their own caption. Where Durer’s Christ has the softness of youth, Brown’s version has translated this into an adult gender ambiguity all the while preserving the sense of interiority and contemplation.

In the main gallery, Brown’s paintings hang among the permanent collection. As one would expect from an artist of such erudition, he is respectful, even when consciously competitive with illustrious forebears. His huge head of a man Grapefruit Juggernaught, 2026 hangs next to Thomas Gainsborough’s seated portrait of the Irish peer and MP for Bristol, Robert Craggs Nugent. Borrowing a late career technique from Austin Osman Spare, Brown has affected a kind of anamorphic projection in the rendering of his hunky male subject, elongating the face and creating a distinct oddness to the perspective. When the work was hung, Brown felt the need to adjust the colour of his shirt, bringing in his paints and brushes in order to turn it a more vivid shade of green than the coat Gainsborough’s Earl is wearing (the image above precedes this alteration). Pictured between the elegant green of the wall covering and curtains behind him and the rich red of the Turkish carpet beneath, the Earl’s dark coat is offset by a glimpse of his scarlet waistcoat. Gainsborough’s colour game is strong. Brown had understood exactly what he so effortlessly achieved and met the challenge in his own way.

Alongside a self-portrait from 1794 by Thomas Barker, and a tender oil sketch by Thomas Laurence for a portrait of Arthur Atherley, Brown has hung his astonishing male nude, When the Satellite Sings, 2024, a composition lifted from an anonymous Italian chalk drawing from the 17th century. Muscular and bearded as an Old Testament prophet, the figure faces away from the viewer so that all our attention plays over this demonstration of masculine power, seemingly at rest. Here the flesh is portrayed in fatty yellows and ruddy earth tones that evoke the pseudo-medical écorché models of the 19th century, where the skin is peeled away to reveal musculature and circulatory systems.

Much earlier, monumental female nudes On the Way to the Leisure Centre, 2017 and Die Mutter des Kunstler, 2016 glow in eerie blues against the blue of the gallery walls. Why, we ask, has the artist’s mother got no head? Is the reclining figure in the other painting really as distorted as we first think? No answers are proffered but all the same the paintings tease our scopic greed and won’t put us down. The last painting you see on the way downstairs is a rendering of Jean-Simeon Chardin’s 1728 painting The Ray in which the hanging gutted fish is made to suggest a face. Where Chardin’s version was seen to challenge the prevailing conventions of still life painting, in Brown’s version, the putrefying fish is portrayed almost as a religious icon, with light radiating all around it. The title of the painting, Lascia ch’io pianga (Drill, baby, drill), 2025 combines the title of an aria by Handel with an infamous quotation from Donald J Trump, encouraging the drilling for oil in previously environmentally protected land. And just when you thought this might be a sanctuary from the ubiquity of that man’s name, I will leave it there, with that suitably grotesque reference. Go to Bath and revel in two extraordinary exhibitions by an artist at the height of his powers.

Caroline Douglas, CAS Director

Glenn Brown: Grottoesque
31 Jan 2026 – 3 January 2027
No 1 Royal Crescent
Bath, BA1 2LR

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Glenn Brown: Arrows of Desire
16 May – 6 Sep 2026
The Holburne Museum
Great Pulteney Street, Bath, BA2 4DB