Glenn Brown, CBE (born 1966, Hexham, Northumberland) is a British contemporary artist celebrated for his intricate, richly layered paintings, drawings and sculptures. He studied at Norwich School of Art, Bath School of Art & Design, and later earned an MA at Goldsmiths College.
Brown is best known for his method of appropriation: he begins with existing images (often from art history, popular culture or other artists), then transforms them by manipulating scale, orientation, colour, and surface texture until they become new, uncanny hybrids. His works explore themes of memory, decay, mutation and the uneasy boundaries between homage and re-creation.
In painting he often works with hyper-refined surfaces: while his images may evoke dense impasto or sculptural texture, his handling is typically very smooth and meticulously controlled. His figures and forms flirt with the surreal, sometimes grotesque, invoking a dream-world sensitivity. In his sculptural and relief works, he layers paint over three-dimensional structures or employs internal supports to give elements a sense of physical depth, blurring the line between object and image.
Brown has exhibited widely, including solo shows at institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery (London), Tate Liverpool, and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 2022 he opened The Brown Collection, a private museum in Marylebone, London, where he displays both his own work and other artists’ work drawn from his personal collection.