The Brown Collection, home to the collection and archive of the acclaimed British artist Glenn Brown, will have its official launch on 14 September 2023 to mark the completion of a six-year building renovation project and the opening of a new exhibition. It joins other artists’ spaces in London including The Gilbert & George Centre and Leighton House.
Located in Marylebone, in Central London, the renovated 1905 mews warehouse offers four floors of exhibition space, an archive and offices. The Brown Collection answers Brown’s long-held desire for a permanent place in London to show his collection, featuring both his own work and that of other artists. Marylebone is home to one of the artist’s favourite museums, the Wallace Collection, and to music venues he enjoys, such as the Wigmore Hall and the Royal Academy of Music.
The exhibition opening on 14 September 2023 will feature some 25 drawings, paintings and sculptures by Brown, among them the paintings Bikini (2022) and Searched Hard for You and Your Special Ways (1995) – the latter appropriated from the Wallace Collection’s A Boy as Pierrot (1785) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Alongside Brown’s work will be a similar number of works by other historical and contemporary artists, also held within The Brown Collection, ranging from Abraham Bloemaert, Henri Fantin-Latour and Jean-Baptiste Greuze to Hans Hartung, Grace Pailthorpe, Fiona Rae and Gillian Wearing.
Glenn Brown was born in 1966 in Hexham, Northumberland and works in London and Suffolk. His work has been the subject of many notable exhibitions internationally. He has presented one-person museum shows in Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as Canada and the United States and, in Britain, at the Serpentine Gallery in London, at Tate Liverpool, at The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and, most recently, at the British Museum, where he exhibited drawings based on Rembrandt, alongside drawings by the Dutch Master himself. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2000.
The Brown Collection is at 1 Bentinck Mews, Marylebone, London W1U 2AF. Opening hours: Thursdays, Fridays & Saturdays from 11am to 6pm. Admission is free.