Glenn Brown

Book excerpt: British painter Glenn Brown's fourth exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin took place at the gallery's temporary space: a small, well-lit apartment in the Charlottenburg district. This superbly produced, oversized publication records both the works and their intimate installation with extraordinary gatefolds that scrutinize the sensuous surfaces of Brown's paintings and sculptures. Full of technical virtuosity and grotesque exaggeration, these works based on reproductions of historical art include a traditional flower painting mutated into bouquets of orifices; a portrait of an old man in sickly colors; fragmented female torsos; and sculptures smothered in thick chunks of oil paint. The extraordinary tension between relish and repulsion achieved by the sculptures can provoke extreme reactions of delight or fascination, as this volume reveals.