As a stroll through the exhibition reveals, Brown’s paintings become more disquietingly weird as they diverge further and further from their origins. Can he envisage jettisoning the reproductions altogether? "Definitely not," he replies. "I need to have a conversation with something in the real world, otherwise I’d become too self-absorbed. I see images as part of the urban landscape, something in the air, and I like things that have already had something thrust upon them by someone else. It would be very dull to make a painting that didn’t refer to something that preexisted it."

Glenn Brown’s retrospective is on view at Tate Liverpool through May 10 and at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, from May 28-Oct. 4.

"Putrid Beauty" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.