Glenn Brown: Grottoesque

22 May-6 Sep 2026

Glenn Brown, Drawing 1 (after Bloemaert), 2018. Photograph by Mike Bruce

Overview

Forty years after studying in the city, Glenn Brown returns to Bath with a major exhibition that disrupts the calm order and symmetry long associated with Georgian design.  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 - in a thematic split exploring humankind and nature.

At the Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent, Brown pits 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.