The Leisure Centre

Overview

The title Leisure Centre questions not what a leisure centre is but what might be the centre of leisure. What is at the heart of our leisure? That point at which relaxation and non-functional activity allows the mind to wander? Indulging in activity or thought just for the pure pleasure of thinking or doing.

At what point does sex go beyond procreation, food satisfies more than hunger furniture becomes more than functional - the point at which it becomes art.

The exhibition asks the viewer to be a flaneur, travelling through time and place around the rooms of The Brown Collection to engage with paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. Question in which century a work was made, who made it and why. The cultural significance or value of a print may be monumental, a painting whose grand gestures are enjoyably false.

A tiny drawing has grand aspirations. We would like the audience to enjoy the surprisingly complex game of smoke and mirrors without expecting a big reveal.

The exhibition will feature some 25 works by Brown, including drawings, paintings and sculptures. Among these are major works such as Bikini (2022), included in his solo exhibition that took place at Gagosian in New York, 8 November - 23 December 2022, and Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways (1995), a painting that Brown appropriated from the Wallace Collection's A Boy as Pierrot (1785) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Both those seminal works reside in The Brown Collection.

Alongside Brown's own work will be a similar number of works by other historical and contemporary artists, also held within The Brown Collection. These artists, each of whom holds a particular meaning for Brown, may be well known, lesser known or simply unknown. One artist whom he cites as being of interest to him is the Dutch Old Master, Abraham Bloemaert (1566 - 1651). Brown owns paintings, drawings and prints by this less famous contemporary of Rembrandt, and has worked from several of them. The forthcoming exhibition will feature drawings by Bloemaert - relevant because Brown is tending at present to make work based on drawings, rather than paintings. Another artist important to Brown, and included in his collection and in the new exhibition, is Grace Pailthorpe (1883 - 1971). A lesser-known Surrealist painter, Pailthorpe trained as a doctor and went on to become both an artist and a psychoanalyst, pioneering a form of art therapy she described as 'psychorealism'. Having discovered her in recent years, Brown finds that her way of combining colour, figuration and abstraction aligns with his own work.

Artists on show