Glenn Brown

Glenn Brown was born in 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland, England. He completed a foundation course at Norwich School of Art in 1985, a BA in Fine Art at Bath College of Higher Education (Bath School of Art and Design) from 1985 to 1988, and an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, from 1990 to 1992.

Brown's practice centers on painting that closely reworks existing images, from Old Master and Romantic paintings to pulp science fiction book covers, rendered with a hyperrealistic, glossy finish that mimics thick impasto while remaining perfectly flat to the touch. He came to wide public attention as part of the generation associated with the Young British Artists, and was included in the landmark 1997 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2000 he was nominated for the Turner Prize, with his submission exhibited at Tate Britain; the nomination drew controversy after one of the paintings closely appropriated a 1973 science fiction illustration, "Double Star," by artist Tony Roberts.

Through the 2000s and 2010s his work was the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004), the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2008), Tate Liverpool (2009, later traveling to the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin), and the Ludwig Museum, Budapest (2010). In 2016 the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles presented a solo exhibition of his work, and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati also presented a solo show of his paintings around the same period. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to art. In October 2022 he opened The Brown Collection in Marylebone, London, a museum showing his own work alongside pieces by other artists from his personal collection. He lives and works in London and Suffolk, England, and in 2026 is the subject of a two-venue exhibition, "Glenn Brown in Bath," across the Holburne Museum and No.1 Royal Crescent.

Brown's technical virtuosity, his ability to paint a surface that reads as thickly worked but is in fact flat, has been a consistent point of critical attention, including in writing tied to his 2016 Contemporary Arts Center survey in Cincinnati by critics such as Lynn MacRitchie and Martin Herbert. Discussion of Brown has also long turned on the ethics and meaning of appropriation, sharpened by the controversy that followed his 2000 Turner Prize nomination over his use of a Tony Roberts science fiction illustration, and by his broader practice of reworking canonical paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, Fragonard, and Salvador Dali.

Brown is represented by Gagosian in New York and London and by Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and Paris. His auction record is "The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (After John Martin)," which sold for GBP 5,161,250 (approximately USD 7.1 million) at Sotheby's London on 1 July 2021. His second highest recorded result is "Jesus; The Living Dead (after 'Jupiter Cloudscape' 1982 by Adolf Schaller)," which sold for GBP 2,202,000 at Christie's London on 28 June 2022. Market data provider HENI reports cumulative auction sales for Brown of roughly USD 69.65 million over the prior 27 years, indicating a market with real depth but a comparatively small number of very large individual results.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Brown, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been identified in current research, which places extra weight on provenance and on verification through his representing galleries or The Brown Collection. His auction history includes a small number of very high-value results and a longer tail of more moderate prices. His deep and continuing museum program, most recently in Hanover, Cincinnati, and Bath, is the more stable signal of institutional standing.