The paintings of British artist Glenn Brown wander freely through the tributaries of art history, channelling unearthly beauty or grotesque decay to depict human and non-human figures. Filtered through the Old and Modernist Masters that Brown appropriates are echoes of Greek mythology and its legacies in art and in metaphors for the subconscious.

“I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, to be not quite of this world. For me they exist in a dream world, a world that is made up of all the accumulated images stored in our subconscious that coagulate and mutate when we sleep.” Brown has gained international renown for paintings, sculptures and drawings that combine an electric palette with a baroque style to take images from western art history into the realm of the uncanny. Male nudes in postures inspired by Greco-Roman statuary are gesturally rendered in hallucinatory colours to pulse with energy; while in a 2025 show at the Freud Museum bodies and trees in states of metamorphoses take the viewer into a world where Greek myths frame Freudian concepts of the unconscious.

Join us for a discussion between the artist and Iwona Blazwick, speaking about the method and meaning of his remarkable oeuvre.

Image: Glenn Brown, Drawing III (after Novelli), 2025, photo by Lucy Dawkins

Contact the host of Echo: Glenn Brown in Conversation with Iwona Blazwick

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