I ncluded in Glenn Brown’s landmark touring exhibition that opened at Tate Liverpool in 2009, as well as an expansive group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2005, Led Zeppelin is a prime exemplar of the artist’s extraordinary painterly practice. Betraying impassioned brushwork yet possessing a photographically unfocused and impossibly smooth painted surface, this work embodies the art of appropriation at its most haunting and extravagant. Executed in 2005, Led Zeppelin belongs to Brown’s iconic and celebrated corpus of work which made their debut at Patrick Painter, Los Angeles. This body of work merges painted copies of great master paintings with references to film, literature and music. Using photographic reproductions of original art works, often themselves inaccurate copies, Brown subverts the images he appropriates: surfaces are flattened, impastoed brushstrokes exaggerated, colours heightened and images distorted and cropped. Taking its title from the Heavy Metal band Led Zeppelin, the present work reimagines the 17th century masterpiece Cleopatra by Francesco del Cairo, adding his own humorously dark twists along the way.

Led Zeppelin epitomises the position of Brown’s work at the intersection of art and technology, appropriation and invention. The present work takes as its inspiration Francesco del Cairo’s 17th century painting Cleopatra, which depicted the legendary Egyptian queen who killed herself for love, a subject repeatedly returned to by the Italian masters. Languorous female figures feature prominently in both Brown and del Cairo’s portraiture, particularly those of the ancient world including Lucretia, Magdalene and Herodias. The figure of Cleopatra, specifically her death, has captivated artists for centuries, with eroticised depictions of her death by snake bite embodying a morbid sexuality in the images of the 17th century. Opulent, beautiful and intoxicating in its evocation of both ecstasy and pain, the sumptuous 17th century work is distorted and inverted in Brown’s distinctive style of metamorphosis. Brown presents us with a back-lit theatrical mutation that apes del Cairo’s painting; the luminous hues of peaches and blushing reds replaced by a yellow pallor punctuated by violent bursts of green, smooth and limber flesh supplanted by twisting, contorted shapes that ripple across the surface of her exposed breast. Hyped-up Technicolor and seductively flawless brushwork here revisit and recapitulate del Cairo’s vigorous original to deliver a cool critical dialogue that at once usurps authorial conventions and scrutinises our twenty-first century relationship with art history.

Exuding a remarkable and even retrogressive Old Master painterly virtuosity, the very essence of Brown’s practice is unassailably embroiled in the elitism of painting’s history. Nonetheless, as the title of the present work underlines, high art coalesces with an elevation of the low. References to popular music and film proliferate in Brown’s ostensibly incongruous titling. Often these reflect the particular moment or mood accompanying the work’s creation, more so however, as articulated by Alison M. Gingeras, “they provide a doorway for the viewer to access the otherwise hermetic and obscure universe of the visual references in his work… while they might not be descriptive, his titles open up the possibility of projecting narrative content onto his work” (Alison M. Gingeras, Ibid., p. 20). Fundamentally Glenn Brown is a painter of paintings: his works intervene and distort the canon of art history by directly employing the terms of our contemporary experience of it – a visual encounter that today is utterly mediated by the ubiquitous reproduction. Entitled Led Zeppelin, sharing its name with the most celebrated rock band in history who created gothic anthems for the 1970s, in the context of Brown, whose work has cannibalised and subverted painterly precedent, this title also raises pertinent questions about authenticity and authorship.

With a major two-part retrospective held at the Sprengel Museum and Landesmuseum, Hannover, in 2023, Brown stands at the forefront of a generation of British artists who came to prominence in the 1990s. A remarkably resolute and complex painting that evidences a masterful conceptual and painterly virtuosity, the exhibition history of Led Zeppelin attests to its significance within the artist’s illustrious oeuvre.

格 倫．布朗的《齊柏林飛船》是藝術家超凡繪畫技法之臻絕典範。此作曾於藝術家2009年在泰德利物浦美術館開幕的巡迴展覽，以及2005年在洛杉磯當代藝術館的大型群展中展出。畫家在本作一改其激情筆觸，透過以攝影的失焦感及異常光滑的畫作表面，體現令人難忘、奢靡浮華的挪用藝術。《齊柏林飛船》作於2005年，屬於布朗標誌性及備受讚譽的作品系列，該系列將大師級畫作的彩繪複製品與電影、文學和音樂融為一體，首度亮相於洛杉磯Patrick Painter畫廊。布朗拿上原作（通常不太精確）的攝影複製品，對他挪用的圖像進行顛覆：他將表面扁平化，再加上誇張的筆觸、強化色彩，以及扭曲與裁剪圖像。本作的標題取自重金屬樂隊「齊柏林飛船」（Led Zeppelin），藝術家重新演繹了畫家弗朗西斯科・德爾・開羅（Francesco del Cairo）的十七世紀傑作《埃及豔后》（Cleopatra），並且加入自己的黑色幽默。

布朗的作品定位於藝術與科技、挪用與發明的交融處，而《齊柏林飛船》正是這定位的臻絕體現。本作受弗朗西斯科・德爾・開羅十七世紀的畫作《埃及豔后》所啟發，該畫描繪了為愛輕生的傳奇埃及女王，是意大利大師級畫家經常使用的畫作主題。布朗和德爾・開羅的肖像畫常出現慵懶的女性形象，尤其是盧克麗霞、抹大拉和希羅底等古代女性。數個世紀以來，埃及豔后的形象一直為藝術家所著迷，尤以其死亡為甚。她因被蛇咬傷致死的色情描繪，體現了十七世紀畫像中的病態性慾。布朗以獨特的變形風格，扭曲並顛倒這幅十七世紀的瑰麗作品，使其變更浮華壯麗，一併喚起狂歡與痛苦，使人陶醉其中。布朗模仿德爾・開羅畫作的背光，並加上戲劇式的變異：明亮的桃紅與緋紅色被替換成淡黃色，中間夾雜著猛烈爆發的綠色；女王本來光滑柔軟的肉體，則被其袒露乳房上的扭曲波紋取代。此作透過誇張艷麗的色彩與誘人的無瑕筆觸，重溫並再現了德爾・開羅蓬勃澎湃的原作，以營造出冷酷的批判性對話，篡奪創作慣例，審視二十一世紀與藝術史的關係。

布朗的繪畫實踐非常精彩，它甚至回歸到古典大師精湛的畫技層次，其本質無疑與繪畫歷史的精英主義糾纏在一起。儘管如此，正如本作標題所示，昇華後的通俗藝術亦能與高雅藝術結合。布朗大量引用流行音樂與電影，為作品起了看似格格不入的標題。通常，這些引用反映了藝術家創作作品時的特定時刻或情緒。但更重要的是，正如艾莉森．M．金格拉斯（Alison M. Gingeras）所述：「它們給予了觀眾一道入口，通往其作品中原本封閉、晦澀的視覺引用世界……儘管他的標題未必有描述作用，但卻具備讓觀者將敘事內容投射到作品上的可能。」（艾莉森．M．金格拉斯，同上，頁20）。格倫．布朗基本上是一位將畫作再繪畫重現的畫家 ，他的作品直接運用我們對藝術史的當代體驗，以干預及扭曲藝術史上的經典——今天，這種視覺體驗由無處不在的複製品為介導。此作的標題為《齊柏林飛船》，與史上最受歡迎的搖滾樂隊同名，他們為1970年代創作出哥德式頌歌。此作蠶食並顛覆了前人原作，而其標題亦向真實性與創作者身份作出提問。

2023 年，漢諾威的史賓格博物館（Sprengel Museum）與漢諾威國家博物館（Landesmuseum）舉辦了一場分為兩部分的大型回顧展，足證布朗位居上世紀九十年代嶄露頭角的英國藝術家一代的前沿。《齊柏林飛船》是一幅異常堅定而複雜的畫作，體現了藝術家的出色構思與高超畫技，而其展覽歷史亦證明了它在布朗的輝煌作品中，佔據著重要的地位。