Glenn Brown - The Real Thing

In his double exhibition at the Sprengel Museum and the Landesmuseum Hannover, Glenn Brown showcases a retrospective selection of his own works since 1995 and confronts them with a selection of favorite paintings from the collections of both museums. The hanging is not organized chronologically according to eras and schools, but focuses on parallels in subject matter: the perishable form, the exposed body, the human image, characterized through brushwork, surface, and materiality. In this way, Brown brings continuities and contrasts from 500 years of painting history into a contemporary dialogue, which is also part of each of his own paintings since the history, topics, and styles of European imagery are always present when he quotes motifs from old masters or science fiction illustrators, recomposes them, and creates his own worlds from brush strokes rendered in minutely fine painting. The book condenses the concept of the exhibition in pointed juxtapositions of paintings and thus opens up a dialogue with history from today's perspective that restores the old masters' original immediacy and unruliness.