One of the most revered painters of his generation, this exhibition (first seen at the Tate Liverpool)  brings together the largest selection of the artist’s work to date. Brown borrows from art history and popular culture, working from the images of Dalí, Auerbach, Rembrandt, science fiction illustrators and many others to investigate the languages of painting and how images are read by the viewer. Brown is fascinated by how reproductions of paintings distort the qualities of their originals. Size, colour, surface texture and brushwork are elements by which original works are transformed from the familiar into the alien. Working from books or projecting reproductions onto a blank picture surface, Brown wildly embellishes his source material. Naturalistic colour becomes putrid or kitsch, figures are elongated or enlarged into the grotesque and heavy impasto, although painstakingly copied, is rendered entirely flat.

The exhibition, which includes over sixty paintings, sculpture and several new works, will be arranged to reveal the artist’s diverse painterly strategies and preoccupations.

Glenn Brown was born in Hexam in 1966. From 1984 to 1992 he studied at Norwich School of Art, the Bath College of Higher Education and then trained at Goldsmith’s College. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2000.

Set in a world where nuclear winter was implemented as a radical solution to the global warming and flooding, the installation Post Global Warming Survival Kit represents the dwelling of a person who watches over the sea shoreline in a post-apocalyptic landscape almost devoid of organic life.

The landscape projection and all the lighting in the installation is in the near infrared part of the spectrum that is completely invisible for the bare human eye but visible with night vision devices that are provided to the audience. This is based on the assumption that when much of the sun light is blocked out from reaching the surface of the earth as is in the nuclear winter scenario, seeing in infrared becomes more useful in terms of surviving.

The installation is presented in completely dark space producing sensations of emptiness and fullness simultaneously when the visitor is walking around the shelter and entering inside.