The Holburne – Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire
16 May – 6 September 2026
No. 1 Royal Crescent – Brown in Bath: Grottoesque
22 May – 6 September 2026
The Holburne is delighted to present Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire, an exhibition of paintings by Glenn Brown (b. 1966 Hexham, Northumberland), one of the most celebrated painters to emerge from the generation of Young British Artists. Featuring a selection of previous works hung amongst the museum’s permanent collection, as well as new works on paper in antique frames, the exhibition sees Brown bring his own twist to the Holburne. Arrows of Desire is one aspect of a double presentation by Brown across two Bath museums, with Brown in Bath: Grottoesque at No. 1 Royal Crescent, from 22 May. Together, the exhibitions represent a homecoming for Brown, who studied at the Bath School of Art and Design from 1985-89.
Known for his borrowed images, vibrant colours, and signature trompe-l’oeil impasto style which provides the illusion of painterly brushstroke, Brown’s work draws explicitly from the canon of art history to create fresh and sometimes disturbing paintings, which reveal a dark sense of humour. With an idiosyncratic, arch relationship to art history, Brown has, over the course of his career, developed a fantastical visual language of his own.
For his Holburne presentation, Brown presents a selection of recent and dramatic works, hung amongst the renowned English and Dutch paintings of the museum’s permanent collection, as well as smaller drawings in antique frames in adjoining galleries. Carefully chosen, these works invite us to search for connections and to experience Brown’s works as they sample, distort, and transform their source material.
In the main gallery, the unfinished qualities of Brown’s Unknown Pleasures (2016) recall Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Arthur Atherley (1791-1792); the figure in Brown’s When The Satellite Sings (2024) faces Thomas Gainsborough’s Robert Craggs Nugent (1761), echoing his reclined pose and hand-on-knee gesture; while the bonnet in Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways (1995), itself based on Fragonard’s A Boy as Pierrot (c.1780), reflects Allan Ramsay’s striking portrait of Rosamund Sargent (1749) which it hangs directly above. These interventions by Brown introduce the uncanny, the excessive, and the unsettling into the ordered and refined atmosphere of the Holburne’s display of 18th century portraiture by Gainsborough and others. The tensions in Brown’s work – between their painterly appearance and flat, shiny surfaces; and between reified artistic references and Brown’s humorous imitations – disturb our relationship to the museum gallery, sharpening the viewer’s attention to both historical artworks as well as Brown’s contemporary practise.
For the concurrent presentation at No 1 Royal Crescent, Brown will play on themes of symmetry and distortion, presenting paintings and drawings which respond to Georgian shell grottos, landscape paintings and the grotesque qualities of trees. The artist will transform one of the gallery rooms into a ‘grotto’, featuring three new large-scale paintings depicting multiple heads, set within shell-encrusted frames, while a selection of his drawings will be on display within the historic house museum. Brown has also designed bespoke wallpaper especially for the exhibition, extending his intervention to the very fabric of the building.
Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne said: “Glenn Brown is one of the most important and most successful painters of an extraordinary generation of artists. We are all thrilled to be welcoming him back to Bath with a series of exciting interventions that promise to disrupt the usual order of the city’s 18th century heritage.”
Glenn Brown said: “From 1985 to 1988 I was a student in Bath and so this beautiful city, built for pleasure, for me became a place of learning and discovery. As a student I was optimistically obsessed with the future, but in a city like Bath, the past is never far away. I realised that to make art I had to first understand the extraordinary paintings, architecture and literature that contemporary culture is created out of. 40 years after my student life it is an extraordinary pleasure to return to Bath and show it some of the delightful journey, to which, it was the genesis. ”
Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire captures Brown’s inimitable style and provides an opportune look back at a painter whose allusive and appropriative methods have interrogated the status of painting since the early 1990s.
About Glenn Brown
Glenn Brown, CBE, (born 1966) is a British artist. He is known for the use of art historical references in his paintings. Starting with reproductions from other artist’s works, Brown transforms the appropriated image by changing its colour, position and size. His grotesque yet fascinating figures appear to be painted with thick impasto, but are actually executed through the application of thin, swirling brushstrokes which create the illusion of almost photographically flat surfaces. The effect is powerful – often unsettling – creating an artistic language that transcends time and pictorial conventions. Brown sees these appropriations and oppositions as key to his approach.
Brown also places sculpture as a central point of his practice. They are created by accumulating thick layers of oil paint over structures or found bronze casts. His sculptures, deliberately emphasizing the three-dimensional quality of oil brushstrokes, stand in stark contrast to his flat paintings. The forms of his sculptures and the colour combinations used reference other artists’ paintings and sculptures.
In the last few years, Brown has extensively embraced drawing. Still conceptually rooted to art historical references, he stretches, combines, distorts and layers images to create subtle yet complex line-based works.