London, Jerwood Space (Gallery), Glenn Brown, April 14 - May 23, 1999; Santa Monica, Patrick Painter Inc., Glenn Brown, June 19 - July 17, 1999; London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown, September 14 - November 7, 2004
Literature
I. Hunt, Glenn Brown, London, 1999; D. Musgrave, “We’ll Drink Through It All This The Modern Age,” Interview with Glenn Brown, Untitled, No. 19, Summer, 1999, pp. 4-6; R. Steiner, ed., Glenn Brown, London, 2004, pp. 48-49 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
Traditionally, “painterly abstraction” connotes an aesthetic turn away from so-called “realistic” representation: figures are distorted, mutated,subverted and otherwise depicted in a manner that renders them practically unrecognizable.The British artist Glenn Brown, whose paintings and sculptures since the early 1990s have garnered myriad critical accoladesincluding a short-listing for the 2000 Turner Prize, has staked his artistic career on developing a different approach to abstraction, one that isbased on art historical appropriation and science. Instead of producing original imagery that is literally visually abstract in composition, Brown trades in a more conceptual, post-modern or deconstructionist abstraction: the appropriation and subsequent metamorphosis of source material culled from centuries of art history, decades of rock music, pop culture and contemporary folklore. The present lot’s composition and form originate from Sir Edwin Henry Landseer’s Dignity and Impudence,1839, a work that Brown appropriates in a number of paintings subsequent to We No Longer Wish to Cling to the Life of the Body including Anaesthesia, 2001, and Special Needs, 2002.
We No Longer Wish to Cling to the Life of the Body
1999 Oil and acrylic paint on plaster with wooden base and Perspex vitrine. Sculpture: 33 x 35 x 22 in. (83.8 x 88.9 x 55.9 cm); overall: 73 1/8 x 40 1/2 x 27 in. (185.7 x 102.9 x 68.6 cm).