[Glenn Brown, Drawing 1 (after Bloemaert), 2018. Photograph by Mike Bruce]
Forty years after studying in the city, contemporary artist Glenn Brown returns to Bath this spring with a major exhibition that disrupts the calm order and symmetry long associated with Georgian design.
Opening on 22 nd May, Brown in Bath will unfold across two historic sites – Glenn Brown: Grottoesque at No.1 Royal Crescent and Glenn Brown in Bath: Arrows of Desire at the Holburne Museum (opening 16 May 2026) – in a thematic split exploring humankind and nature.
According to his Wikipedia entry, “Glenn Brown CBE (born 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland) is a British contemporary artist known for the use of appropriation in his paintings. Starting with reproductions from other artists’ works, Glenn Brown transforms the appropriated image by changing its colour, position, orientation, height and width relationship, mood and/or size. “
Part of his education included time spent at Bath College of Higher Education before moving on to Goldsmiths.
At the Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Brown will pit symmetry against distortion, his paintings and drawings responding to the Georgian shell grotto, landscapes and the grotesque nature of trees. Brown will even transform one of the Gallery rooms into a ‘grotto’ featuring three new large-scale paintings of multiple heads, set within shell-encrusted frames. While the main exhibition will display in the Gallery, visitors will also be able to discover a selection of his drawings within the historic house museum itself. Brown has also designed new bespoke wallpaper for the exhibition, extending his intervention into the very fabric of the building.
At the Holburne Museum, Brown will interweave a selection of his recent and dramatic works among the museum’s renowned collection of historic British and Dutch paintings, alongside paintings and drawings displayed in antique frames in adjoining galleries. These carefully staged interventions will introduce the uncanny and the excessive into the ordered and refined atmosphere of the Holburne’s display of 18th-century portraiture by Gainsborough and others. The resulting friction renders the familiar strange, sharpening our perception of both the historic collection and Brown’s own contemporary practice.
Patrizia Ribul, Director of Museums at Bath Preservation Trust, said: “We are delighted to be co-hosting Brown in Bath, bringing Glenn Brown’s work into dialogue with two of Bath’s most distinctive museums. I have personally admired his work for many years, since acquiring one of his paintings for the Tate, and have always been struck by the precision and wit of his interventions in historic houses and collections. Seeing his work return to Bath, where he studied, and disrupt these ordered Georgian settings is particularly exciting.”
The exhibition at No.1 Royal Crescent will be accompanied by a public programme including a talk by Glenn Brown, art workshops with local makers, and family activities during school holidays.
Tickets to Glenn Brown: Grottoesque will be available on the website no1royalcrescent.org.uk/exhibitions/ in due course. Tickets are £7 / £2.50 when purchased as an add-on to the main museum entry.
