The new show of Glenn Brown at Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, presents work made in the past two and a half years. It marks a transition from the mid-career survey at Tate Liverpool earlier in 2009, with an  intensification of his highly individual vision . Brown came to prominence in the second wave of the YBAs in the 1990s, with intricately  plotted mutations of artworks;  from the wild panoramas of 19^th century seer John Martin to expressionist portraits  by  Frank Auerbach.  He continues to draw from history and the exhibition includes revisions of  Fragonard, van Gogh, Soutine, and a wilful distortion of  Holbein’s Queen Christina of Denmark.

The images are worked on through photoshop manipulation, the  dematerialised images are then painstakingly transcribed and amended into an immaculate surface of  liquid brushwork. Linear patterns swirl with crevices of flesh and darkness. There is a repellent energy  in the statements of crepulous deterioration.  In a great panel,  Spearmint Rhino 2009, the body of a dead sheep steams with a fetid aura, its woollen coat morphing from tufts of fresh pink/white to patches of lurid green and  brown. The dirge to mortality is particularly nightmarish in Nausea 2008. The painting references Velàsquez’ intimidating  Pope Innocent X (1650), with an upended figure falling to the void, its garments spreading in soft white trails cut with crimson stains. De Baser 2008 explodes a cloud of flowers, their sickly swirls flowing into a triffid-like vapour.  The shaped panel ‘Christ Returns to the Womb’ 2009 transforms Van Gogh’s Pietà to an ethereal blue shroud, the figures fuse like melted plastic and a blackened area draws the senses to a flume-like vortex. Brown probes the relics of culture in a searing critical process, with no room,  no escape route anymore to evade the disturbance of  his original creations.

-- Nicholas James

All Images © Glenn Brown. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo credit: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Images from top to bottom:(Glenn Brown's War in Peace, 2009, Debaser, 2008 and Come All Ye Rolling Minstrels, 2009, © Glenn Brown. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo credit: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.)