The Brown Collection at Frieze Masters : Touring Exhibition

For its third iteration, the section is premised on the theme of the studio as a time machine through which historical memory inspires contemporary creativity. Featuring new paintings, drawings, and a sculpture together with works from three decades of Brown's career, the presentation also includes historical works on paper from the Brown Collection. 

Brown mines art history, transforming divergent imagery through intricate line and pattern, heightened palette, and elaborate gesture. Compositing variations of his pictorial sources with natural forms and adding distortions of human anatomy-including doubled heads-he presents a vision that is at once sensuous, alluring, and grotesque. Brown's works at Frieze Masters incorporate elements inspired by such predecessors as Renaissance luminary Raphael, Mannerist printmakers Hendrick Goltzius and Abraham Bloemaert, Baroque artists Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Jacob Jordaens, Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Symbolist Odilon Redon, School of London modernist Frank Auerbach, and contemporary German master Georg Baselitz, among others. The dialogue with the past in Brown's works extends to the frames, many of which are antique and an integral aspect of their appearance and meaning. He develops his works with these frames on hand, informed by their designs.

 Brown's titles allude to music, literature, and popular culture, with references to the foundational post-punk band Joy Division (Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways, 1995), Motown duo Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye (The Real Thing, 2000), classic Hollywood (International Velvet, 2004), and modernist poet Jules Laforgue (The Laughing Stock of the Heartless Stars, 2024). These paintings and drawings are complemented by a new sculpture, Swig (2025). Beginning with an antique marble statue, Brown applied thick layers of paint, obscuring bodily features and building up the work's surfaces with amorphous masses of accumulated oil paint.

 At Frieze Masters, Brown's works are presented together with selections from the artist's collection, with prints and drawings by Bloemaert, Mauro Gandolfi, Goltzius, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo-all old masters whose innovative use of line spanned painting and the graphic arts. Also included are works by Austin Osman Spare, a twentieth-century English artist and occultist whose figurative drawings are both sophisticated and eccentric.

 For the past decade, Brown has devoted sustained attention to line as a compositional element. Noting our innate ability to interpret hand-drawn lines, he poses the question: 

But what if the hand doesn't always tell the truth? Maybe it pretends to be attached to someone or something else. Perhaps it's playing a role-and we all love actors, don't we? It could be an obsessive seventeenth-century Flemish Protestant, a flamboyant eighteenth-century Italian Catholic, or a spiritualist poet living at the edge of society in early twentieth-century London. I attempt all of these roles and more whilst painting or drawing.