Beschreibung:

Glenn Brown Oscillate Wildly (after ‘Autumnal Cannibalism’ 1936 by Salvador Dalí 1999 By kind permission of the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation, Spain oil on linen 175.5 x 391.9 cm. (69 1/8 x 154 1/4 in.) Signed, titled and dated 'Glenn Brown 1998-9 'Oscillate Wildly'' on the reverse.
Provenance Patrick Painter Gallery, Los Angeles Exhibited London, Tate Britain, Turner Prize 2000, 25 October 2000 – 14 January 2001 London, Serpentine Gallery, Glenn Brown 24 September – 7 November 2004 Tate liverpool, Glenn Brown Living Vicariously, 20 February - 10 May 2009;then travelled to Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, (28 May – 4October 2009), Budapest, Ludwig Múzeum (6 February - 11 April 2010) Literature Glenn Brown Exh. Cat., Tate Liverpool, 2009, pp. 62-65 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay 'To make something up from scratch is nonsensical. Images are alanguage. It’s impossible to make a painting that is not borrowed —even the images in your dreams refer to reality.' GLENN BROWN 'Dalí’s paintings are terrible, tacky, vulgar, gruesome,full of adolescent self-loathing. That’s why I like them.' GLENN BROWN Stemming out of the Young British Artists of the early nineties, Turner Prize nominated Glenn Brown is recognized as one of the foremost painters of his generation. Like many of his contemporaries, Chris Ofli and Peter Doig Brown negotiates the reception, transmission and over saturation of imagery in the contemporary landscape; through his paintings, Brown creates a dialogue between historical methodologies and contemporary concerns. Simultaneously appropriating and paying homage to artworks by canonical figures such as Delacroix, Rembrant, Fragonard, Salvador Dali and Frank Auerbach among others, Brown is perhaps best known for his appropriation of iconic works of art as well as his exploration of sub-genres (or 'marginal art') such as early science-fiction landscapes, which, in Brown’s hands evoke the cosmic sublime found in paintings by John Martin and J.M.W. Turner. Recreating familiar subject matter, the artist employs a haunting and masterful dexterity, often depicting the familiar in what appears to be impressionist swirls of impasto yet retaining a strikingly smooth and deliberately flat surface. In this way, Brown’s practice successfully contradicts its references through this effective manipulation, modifying and exaggerating the scale and color palette of his paintings to create a distinctive disparity between original and simulacra. Brown will often source his appropriated material from reproductions found in exhibition catalogues or online, scanning the image, manipulating color and distorting form with a computer program until the source image reflects the desired qualities. Glenn Brown will then manipulate the image to take on characteristics of yet another artwork by a different artist, citing his secondary source in the size or color palette of his final painting. Of course, using reproduced images of artworks implies that the artist’s sources are already found in a mediated state: 'I pick images that have something missing […] There’s a purposeful impoverishment in living via secondhand information in a world of videos, computers, films.' (Glenn Brown in S. Kent, 'Putrid Beauty', BlouinArtinfo, May 14, 2009) Underscoring the artist’s complex oeuvre, Glenn Brown’s practice can be described as painterly abstraction within the tradition of appropriation, surrealism and photorealism, magnificently exemplified in the present lot, Oscillate Wildly (after ‘Autumnal Cannibalism’ 1936 by Salvador Dalí , 1999. This particular painting, exhibited at the Tate Liverpool during Glenn Brown’s eponymous retrospective in 2009, was installed in the same room as his transcendent science-fiction landscape Jesus, The Living Dead (after Adolf Schaller), 1997-98, as well as his other towering Dali-inspired painting, Dali-Christ (after Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War 1936 by Salvador Dali), 1992. These two genres represent the artist’s earlier desire to communicate directly with the source material, allowing for organic variants from the original sources depending on the quality of his source material and the manner in which he filtered it. Here, Brown’s painting is indexical to t