Glenn Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire

16 May 2026 – 6 September 2026

Included in general admission tickets
Suitable for all ages
Wheelchair accessible

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Glenn Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire

Glenn Brown in Bath is an exhibition across two Bath museums, the Holburne and No. 1 Royal Crescent, featuring the work of Glenn Brown, one of the most celebrated painters to come out of the Young British Artist generation.

He is famous for borrowing images, colours, painterly brushstrokes and drawn lines from art history to create fresh yet disturbing paintings that reveal a dark humour. He has created a fantastical pictorial language of his own.

For the Holburne, Glenn will be hanging a selection of his past works amongst the cycle of the renowned English paintings in the museum’s permanent collection, as well as smaller drawings in antique frames in adjoining galleries. Brown’s interventions will introduce the uncanny, the excessive, and the unsettling into spaces usually associated with refinement and order. This tension makes the familiar unfamiliar, sharpening our attention to both the historical artworks and Brown’s contemporary practice. Having studied at Bath School of Art and Design in 1995 to 1988, Brown is back in Bath, bringing his own twist on the Holburne’s collection.

Find out more about Glenn Brown in Bath: Grottoesque at No1 Royal Crescent
(separate tickets required)

“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. ”
Glenn Brown

Supporters

Glenn Brown, On the Way to the Leisure Centre, 2017.
Image courtesy the Artist and The Brown Collection © Glenn Brown. Photography by Mike Bruce
Glenn Brown, Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways, 1995.
Image Credit: Image courtesy the Artist and The Brown Collection © Glenn Brown. Photography by Joe Humphrys.
Glenn Brown, The suicide of Guy Debord, 2001.
Image Credit: Image courtesy the Artist and The Brown Collection © Glenn Brown. Photography by The Brown Collection.