Glenn Brown is known for his highly detailed paintings that reinterpret images from art history into surreal and often grotesque forms. Forty years after studying in Bath he returns to the city with a dual-site exhibition at The Holburne and at No.1 Royal Crescent. Image above: Glenn Brown. Photography by Edgar Laguinia © The Brown Collection
In the crowded world of contemporary British art, Glenn Brown has carved out a position that feels both distinctive and quietly subversive. For more than three decades, he has made paintings that seem, at first glance, to belong to the past – echoing the Old Masters, the drama of Baroque art, and even the dreamlike qualities of Surrealism. But look closer and something stranger emerges: familiar images reworked into forms that feel unsettling, even slightly uncanny.
Born in Northumberland in 1966, Brown studied at Norwich School of Art, Bath School of Art and Design from 1985-89, and later Goldsmiths in London. Although his career loosely overlaps with the Young British Artists group, he has always stood apart from their more provocative, headline-grabbing tactics. He has remained true to the pursuit of painting excellence – albeit not in any traditional sense.
Brown has even compared his process to assembling something new from fragments of the past, describing himself as “rather like a Dr Frankenstein…
That connection to Bath now comes full circle. Forty years after studying in the city, Brown returns for a major dual-site exhibition. As he puts it, “From 1985 to 1988 I was a student in Bath and so this beautiful city, built for pleasure, for me became a place of learning and discovery.” He adds that although he was then “optimistically obsessed with the future”, Bath made him realise that “in a city like Bath, the past is never far away.”
Brown doesn’t paint from life. Instead, he takes his cue from images of paintings found in books, catalogues or online. His starting points range widely, from Rembrandt and Velázquez to Van Gogh and Salvador Dalí. He rarely takes from just one source. Instead, he blends and reshapes multiple images, reworking them until the original visual becomes almost impossible to trace. “I look at hundreds of images… to find a reproduction I can transform,” he has said.
Above: When the Satellite Sings, 2024.
Brown has even compared his process to assembling something new from fragments of the past, describing himself as “rather like a Dr Frankenstein, constructing paintings out of… other artists’ work.” The end result is never a copy or tribute. He puts it more simply: “I never make a direct quotation.”
This layered, referential approach forms the basis of Glenn Brown in Bath, a major two-part exhibition presented across the Holburne Museum and No.1 Royal Crescent. At the Holburne, Arrows of Desire places Brown’s paintings and drawings directly within the museum’s historic collection of English and Dutch art, creating deliberate visual collisions between contemporary distortion and 18th-century portraiture.
Holburne director Dr Chris Stephens describes Brown as “one of the most important and most successful painters of an extraordinary generation of artists,” adding that the museum is “thrilled to be welcoming him back to Bath with a series of exciting interventions that promise to disrupt the usual order of the city’s 18th century heritage.”
That disruption is carefully staged. In the main gallery, Brown’s works are positioned in direct dialogue with historical portraits: the figure in When the Satellite Sings (2024) echoes Thomas Gainsborough’s Robert Craggs Nugent, while other works draw out uncanny visual rhymes with Thomas Lawrence and Allan Ramsay. The effect is not illustrative but destabilising – an atmosphere in which art history feels both present and strangely warped.
For Brown, this is intentional. His paintings draw explicitly from the canon of art history to create fresh and sometimes disturbing paintings, which reveal a dark sense of humour. Brown himself describes his method as an “idiosyncratic, arch relationship to art history,” one that has allowed him to develop “a fantastical visual language of his own.”
Alongside the Holburne exhibition, Grottoesque at No.1 Royal Crescent extends this dialogue into a more architectural and environmental register. Here, Brown turns his attention to Georgian shell grottos, landscape painting and the grotesque qualities of nature itself.
At No.1 Royal Crescent, he will transform one gallery space into a grotto-like environment, complete with three new large-scale paintings of multiple heads set within shell-encrusted frames. He will also introduce bespoke wallpaper, extending his intervention into the fabric of the historic house. Patrizia Ribul, Director of Museums at Bath Preservation Trust, notes, the project is particularly resonant given Brown’s return to the city where he studied. She describes being “struck by the precision and wit of his interventions in historic houses and collections,” adding that seeing his work “disrupt these ordered Georgian settings is particularly exciting.”
Between the two venues, a thematic split emerges – refinement and distortion, order and excess, surface and instability. At No.1 Royal Crescent, Brown explicitly plays with symmetry and grotesquerie, responding to the decorative logic of Georgian interiors. At the Holburne, he works more through collision, inserting his works among canonical paintings so that each alters the perception of the other.
One of the standout works at the Holburne is When the Satellite Sings. Nearly two metres high, it centres on a seated male nude that initially appears rooted in classical figure painting. But the longer it is viewed, the more unstable it becomes: the body dissolves into swirling ribbons of paint-like form, hovering between solidity and disappearance. Rather than a fixed figure, it becomes something in flux – an image perpetually forming and distorting itself.
Part of what makes Brown’s work so compelling is a constant tension between surface appearance and material reality. That sense of visual uncertainty runs through much of Brown’s work. To the viewer, his paintings are truly deceptive: what appears to be thick, heavily textured impasto – applied with speed and energy – is in fact rendered with painstaking precision to leave a completely smooth, trompe-l’oeil, enamel-like surface. It is a carefully constructed illusion, one that plays with the viewer’s expectations, often leaving them with a strong desire to try and touch the artwork. Not allowed.
The exhibition brings Brown’s work into dialogue with “two of Bath’s most distinctive museums…
Patrizia Ribul, Director of Museums at Bath Preservation Trust
This is especially evident in Fail We May, Sail We Must. At first glance, it presents a turbulent seascape, but slowly other forms emerge – fleeting suggestions of a face embedded within the swirls of the waves.
The result is neither landscape nor portrait, but something in between, with shapes that are always shifting.
His references span centuries – from Van Dyck to Frank Auerbach – but by the time they have passed through Brown’s process, they remain as echoes rather than quotations. What remains is a kind of visual memory rather than a fixed source.
That tension is also present in On the Way to the Leisure Centre. The title feels deliberately dull, even comic, sitting awkwardly against imagery that suggests classical painting. Figures derived from artists such as Fragonard are pulled into elongated, weightless forms drifting across the canvas. As Brown has said, his titles are often “embarrassingly direct” – a deliberate counterpoint to works that are far too complicated to read.
It also reflects how images now circulate. Most of us encounter painting through reproduction rather than direct experience, and Brown leans into this condition. His works are built from second-hand imagery, constantly reshaped and reinterpreted, reflecting a visual culture in which images are endlessly recycled.
Beyond painting, this approach extends into sculpture and printmaking. His etchings layer historical references into dense compositions, while his sculptures translate painterly gesture into solid form – brushstrokes frozen in three dimensions.
At the Holburne, these works sit within an institution defined by elegance and the historical continuity of art. At No.1 Royal Crescent, they enter one of Bath’s most perfect expressions of Georgian order. The contrast is deliberate. As Ribul notes, the exhibition brings Brown’s work into dialogue with “two of Bath’s most distinctive museums,” creating a situation where his interventions actively unsettle the very architectural fabric of the building.
For visitors, the experience is likely to be both seductive and disorienting. Brown’s work draws the eye with its beauty, then quietly undermines certainty. Are these images old or new? Familiar or invented? Are they solid or in transition?
The answer is always just out of reach – and perhaps that is the point. In a time when painting is often regarded as being either exhausted or endlessly renewed, Glenn Brown occupies a more ambiguous space. His work does not attempt to reinvent painting so much as to question what it already contains – and what it might be transformed into in a world already saturated with banal images.
Find exhibition details and tickets at: holburne.org
and at: no1royalcrescent.org.uk
Glenn Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire
16 May – 6 September 2026
The Holburne Museum, Great Pulteney Street, Bath
Glenn Brown in Bath: Grottoesque
22 May – 6 September 2026
The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Bath