Glenn Brown is what is known in the trade as a second generation appropriationist, meaning that he borrows freely from the storehouse of art history, plundering images of other people’s art and giving them an unexpected twist. While the New York appropriationists of the early 80s were motivated by a desire to politically criticise the canonical works they copied, Glen Brown piles on the layers of bare-faced bootlegging, deft pop references and slick touches of originality so thickly, that his ultimate intentions remain indecipherable.

His show at the Ludwig promises to be a treat, with oodles of gorily retouched chocolate-box portraits, in which familiar Rembrandts morph into strange and surreal figures, like a bad acid trip. There are also examples of his meticulous copying of the cover illustrations of 70s science fiction classics, whose hyperbolic fantasies in garish colours and futuristic forms were apparently so good already, that he didn’t feel the need to change much. There’s an open-source freedom in Brown’s way of seeing our visual archive as a potential source for quotation, morphing and re-situating.
The secret of Brown’s artistic method lies in taking as the starting point not original art works themselves, but rather bad reproductions of iconic paintings, many of which he confesses not to have actually seen in person. The distorted colours of a photocopy of an old catalogue or a faded postcard reproduction are exaggerated further through the artist’s intervention on the image, blurring the boundary between authentic original and inauthentic copy, and sowing confusion between the accepted notions of traditional painting and the serious avant-garde gesture.

One of original generation of Young British Artists that came out of Goldsmiths College of Art in the early 1990s, Brown from the beginning went against the conceptual grain of his peers, such as Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin and Michael Landy, by persevering with the ‘dead’ medium of painting. He just missed out on the Turner Prize in 2000, causing controversy when some visitors detected plagiarism in the uncanny similarity between one of his paintings and the cult science fiction illustration Double Star. Brown has no regrets when it comes to copying, as he recently put it: ‘It’s impossible to make a painting that is not borrowed — even the images in your dreams refer to reality.’