Glenn Brown: Etchings (Portraits)

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 book – 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. A specially commissioned text by John-Paul Stonard, accompanies the 22 plates. Here, he discusses elements of the old and the new in the portraits as they embody concepts of destruction and the violence of appropriation.