Echo: Glenn Brown in Conversation with Iwona Blazwick

Wednesday 27 May 2026

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.  

The talk will be followed by a drinks reception supported by Gagosian

Echo is a series of conversations with some of the world’s leading artists giving insight into their creativity while revealing the echoes of the past civilizations that resonate in their work, curated by Iwona Blazwick.

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

Additional information

Glenn Brown 

Glenn Brown (b. 1966, Hexham, England) is known for using references to art history in his paintings. Using reproductions of works by other artists, he transforms the image by changing its colour, position and size. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as the Centre d’art contemporain du Domaine de Kerguéhennec (France, 2000), the Serpentine Gallery (London, 2004), the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna, 2008), Tate Liverpool (England, 2009) – Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin) and the Ludwig Múzeum (Budapest) –, the Frans Hals Museum in (Haarlem, Netherlands, 2013), the Rennie Collection (Vancouver, 2013), the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles (France, 2016), Des Moines Art Centre (Iowa, 2016), the Contemporary Art Centre (Cincinnati, 2016), the Rembrandt House (Amsterdam, 2017), the Museo Stefano Bardini (Florence, 2017), the Laing Art Gallery (Newcastle, 2018), the British Museum (London, 2018), the Sprengel Museum and the Landesmuseum (Hanover, 2023) and the Freud Museum (London, 2025). His upcoming solo exhibitions will be held at the Holburne Museum (Bath, 2026) and Gainsborough House (Suffolk, 2026).

Iwona Blazwick

Iwona Blazwick OBE is a British art critic and lecturer. She is currently the Curator of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel. She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 – 2022.

Echo

Echo is a series of conversations with some of the world’s leading artists giving insight into their creativity while revealing the echoes of the past civilizations that resonate in their work, curated by Iwona Blazwick.