Best known and celebrated for his painting, Glenn Brown’s new etchings are an exciting change in medium that further establish Brown’s fascination with surface texture and mark making. The artist’s first ever group of etchings – the focus of this exhibition at Karsten Schubert – offers a striking approach to the portrait and its history.
Each work is made by repeatedly layering single or multiple portraits by Urs Graf, Rembrandt and Lucian Freud. In placing faces on top of each other, Brown has created new portraits by simultaneously copying and erasing. Essentially anti-portraits, they are at once recognisable and completely unfamiliar to explore such concepts as destruction and violence of appropriation.