In the end we all succumb to the pull of the molten core (2016)

Glenn Brown has combined drawings of the head of an old man by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and that of a young man by Andrea del Sarto. The faces emerge from a gaseous swirl of almost calligraphic lines, the heads melded together as the young man looks forward to the future and the bearded elder looks back to the past with occluded eyes. The accumulation of marks would suggest a plasticity to the surface, but as with his earlier paintings, the hermetic smoothness of the finish denies any probing of the picture plane. While Brown’s paintings are emphatically handmade, the conjuring of protean form from an inchoate swarm gestures to very contemporary forms of digital animation.

In the end we all succumb to the pull of the molten core (2016) was made especially for the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, and is recognisable as part of a new body of work that the artist has embarked on since 2014. Famous for his appropriation and manipulation of old master paintings, Brown has developed a new group of works that instead borrow their subject matter from Renaissance drawings. The grey ground of the painting references the coloured paper favoured by artists of the period, and his black ink and white acrylic mediums mimic the ink with chalk highlights that were typically employed in sketches and preparatory works.

This image may be shared and re-used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Any further use will need to be cleared directly with the rights holder.

Read our copyright policy for more information.