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The Opening — Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren at the Rennie Collection

Rebecca Warren at the Rennie Collection, installation view. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

Rebecca Warren at the Rennie Collection, installation view. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

The works of Glenn Brown and those of Rebecca Warren were not brought together as a character foil, as I had initially thought when I first visited the exhibition at The Rennie Collection, pressed into a bubbling crowd of people keen on catching their first glimpses of the much-lauded work. Though their differences are obvious — Brown is painting, Warren is sculpture; where he's all gloss and smoothness, she's lumps and punctures and fingerprints — the two award-winning British artists have a lot more in common than you'd get in a surface reading.

The second time I went to see the exhibition, I brought a sculptor friend of mine whose practical experience with clay and bronze far surpassed mine. Predictably, she was transfixed by Warren's work, pointing out historical postures here and there (the turned calf, for example — a signifier of gentlemanly good health) with all the delight of a child on a scavenger hunt.  The fluency with which Warren can incorporate a vast array of references shies away from the overt appropriation that Brown became advantageously notorious for.

This light-handedness is one of her work's greatest successes. Another, paradoxically, is the way in which it is deliberately set to fail. Fashioned out of unfired clay, occasionally wrapped around cumbersome armatures, Warren's work is both precarious and ponderous. The vitrines that mostly enclose them seem to be as much of an archival choice than a practical one: we expect them to list sideways or crumble away at any given moment. And yet, they never do.

Rebecca Warren, The Hostess, 2006. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

Warren engages sexuality in a way that is brash, harsh, and deeply tactile. What is erogenous becomes abject in its exaggeration. Breasts, thighs and buttocks are moulded in fistfuls of adolescent desire — one thinks of clumsy porno drawings scrawled into the backs of three-subject notebooks; how their overtly sexual content is based not on the female figure but on the vivid bulges and curves of male fantasy. Warren turns the deft gesture of her hands into the elongated gaze of the pervert, tapping into both sides of objectified looking in a way that is empathetic to the experiences of both the looker and of the looked-at.

This erotic abjectness is the strongest link between Warren's work, and Brown's — which is hung separately in the next room of Rennie's crisp and vast space. Where Warren grabs at bodies in all their cellulite thickness, Brown paints them grotesquely in thin and uncanny layers. It's most evident in Seventeen Seconds, a somewhat classic portrait in that it is a figure against a plain ground — albeit a figure with puckered sexual orifices subbed in for eyes, nose, and mouth. In Brown's portraits, flesh writhes and melts off the bodies that it should be fixed on. It drips and putrefies in an unsettling fluctuation between that which is living and that which is dead. The same adolescent glee present in Warren's sculpture as sexual fetishism appears in Brown's repeated indulgence of grossness, theatricality, and angst.

Glenn Brown at the Rennie Collection, installation view. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

Where Warren is coy about her influences, Brown addresses them head-on, lifting from art history and popular culture alike. This doesn't always happen quietly: Chris Foss, the notable sci-fi illustrator on whose paintings Brown based some of his most famous compositions, stormed into the opening of Brown's retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery to confront him about what he saw as outright theft. Brown, however, remains candid about his usage of reference material. "The entire world," he said in an interview with Lynn MacRitchie, "is made of other peoples' ideas."

The works based on the vast spacescapes of Foss et al. function similarly to the works based on historical portraiture in that they contain myriad technical exertions that are somehow both smudgy and precise, all glossed under an improbably smooth surface that brings to mind the magazines and textbooks their subject matter was clipped out of. The point of it all being that this wealth of reference material is just a starting point — an "incidental object," as Brown describes it in that same interview — from which to elicit a vivid emotional response.

Glenn Brown, The Ever Popular Dead (after 'Jupiter Cloudscape' 1982 by Adolf Schaller), 2006. Courtesy of the Rennie Collection, Vancouver. Photo: Blaine Campbell.

It's curious to see both Brown and Warren speak so candidly about the importance of emotion in art — in our postmodern era, emotion without restraint is seen as gauche or datedly dramatic, the opposite of the cool rationality with which the demystified artist is expected to engage with the world. However, it is perhaps the unfashionable nature of Brown's and Warren's work that gives it the most allure. As painting and sculpture, these works speak a language already known to us — yet, in their scope and sensitivity, they have infinitely more to say.

The Glenn Brown and Rebecca Warren exhibition is open from now until March 29th.

Make an appointment to visit the Rennie Collection.

Learn more about Glenn Brown.

Learn more about Rebecca Warren.