British painter Glenn Brown's current show in New York offers a rare stateside look at his latest work. © Glenn Brown/Gagosian Gallery/
Authors like Maurice Sendak try in their books to conjure the real terror that children often feel about the hidden creatures they imagine crouching in the pitch-black night.
Most adults later dismiss such fears. Not Glenn Brown.
The London-based artist revels in the uneasy beauty of the monstrous, a quality that infuses his latest Gagosian Gallery show, through June 21, in New York. Since the early 1990s, Mr. Brown has built an international reputation painting unearthly renditions of other artists' works—borrowing ideas from the floating, sci-fi cities of Chris Foss to the surreal landscapes of Salvador Dalí to the powdered-wig portraits of Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
Over time Mr. Brown's reimagined versions take on a deep-sea strangeness: His Fragonard girl might have mustard-colored skin and vacant, cataract eyes. His flowery still lifes rot.
Mr. Brown's latest works mainly depict overripe bouquets and portraits of zombie-eyed old men dressed in velvety fashions he has cribbed from the Baroque. The artist, age 48, sees memento mori in the combination. "Flowers are at their prettiest just before they die, and men are at their wealthiest just before they die," he said. "I think there's beauty in something that's not quite dead yet because that means it's still transforming."
Collectors must agree, because they have paid as much as $8.1 million at auction for his paintings. His colorful sculptures, in which he slathers lumpen blobs of paint atop kitschy copies of bronzes by artists like Auguste Rodin, have sold for up to $500,000 at auction as well. Mr. Brown's work has been exhibited in major museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
In a marketplace that covets mirrored surfaces and aspirational imagery, Mr. Brown's morbid oeuvre stands apart. So does his glacial working pace. Mr. Brown said he rarely finishes more than a half-dozen paintings a year; the 13 canvases in his Gagosian show took him more than three years to finish, he said. That is partly because a few are so big. "Necrophiliac Springtime," which depicts an array of wilting chrysanthemums letting off decaying vapors, stretches 10 feet wide.
Others, like "Cactus Land," appear straightforward at first glance but aren't. The saint he has painted is looking heavenward, but the figure has minuscule gaping mouths and eye sockets peppered throughout his beard, a Boschian hell hidden beneath the halo.
From a distance, Mr. Brown's curly brush strokes evoke the thickly painted impasto of abstract masters like Frank Auerbach or Willem de Kooning, but his surfaces are actually glassy smooth. Such dexterity was prized in Rembrandt's day but is rare now. Mr. Brown said he honed the technique while studying art in 1990s London, when his peers like Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn were making "shock art" using rotting meat and frozen blood. Painting was considered passe, so Mr. Brown decided he would need to master the form before he could use it to say anything new.
The artist also relied on his own upbringing for inspiration. In rural Norwich, England, where he grew up, Mr. Brown said his workaday parents didn't pay much attention to art—but they did ply him with gothic novels and folk tales about the Green Man who supposedly haunted the woodlands nearby. The artist's father was also fond of the Transcendentalist philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and encouraged his son to think about the unseen, spiritual forces that may be at work in the world.
Mr. Brown remains particularly fond of the Pre-Raphaelites and the wall-size history paintings at London's Tate museums. Initially, he tried to match their grandeur in his own canvases, but bog-like creatures and eerie eyeballs kept popping up. "It's likely my father's fault," he said, with a grin.
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com