Glenn Brown

Low Hanging Fruit (2025) takes as its source a red-and-white chalk drawing on blue paper by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770). It is one of the rare instances in which Brown’s source is a work from his own collection.

Brown follows Tiepolo’s composition while obscuring the heavily bearded figure’s features in a dense mass of curling brushstrokes.

The title is ironic. ‘Low-hanging fruit’ describes an easy win, yet the work resists easy reading. The head is punctured with holes that suggest bodily openings such as eyes or ears, and it is unclear whether there are one or two faces. It may not be a portrait at all, but swirling smoke, an amorphous blob or an abstract composition.

The work reflects Brown’s long-standing interest in visual ambiguity, a theme explored throughout the current exhibition, Fail We May, Sail We Must, at The Brown Collection.

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Artwork

Glenn Brown, Low Hanging Fruit, 2025, Oil, acrylic and Indian ink on panel.

Salvador Dalí, Comment sont ses yeux... (How are his eyes...), 1973, drypoint with engraving on natural vellum.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Study of the Head of Giulio Contarini, seen from the left, after the bust by Alessandro Vittoria, red chalk heightened with white chalk on blue paper (recto and verso).

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Photographs

Joe Humphrys
The Brown Collection

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Fail We May, Sail We Must
25.09.2026 - 07.08.2027

The Brown Collection
1 Bentinck Mews, W1U 2AF
Open 10:30 – 18:00, Wednesday – Saturday
Free admission

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