Brown’s (Mr P.J. Brown)

Location

Country: United Arab Emirates
City: Abu Dhabi
Place: British Embassy

This painting comes from a series of 42 depictions of jockeys' livery colours, entitled "Brown's". Each work in the series is like a diagram, showing the costume for an invisible man. In every painting, the livery colours shown are for jockeys who rode for owners with the surname Brown. Mark Wallinger was interested by the irony in the range of colours registered to that particular surname, noting that if all the different paints on a palette are mixed together, the end result is generally brown. Themes of class and identity are important in Wallinger's work, and he has commented on how it is only the apostrophe in the title "Brown's" which differentiates between appearance and ownership.

Mark Wallinger was born in Chigwell in Essex. He studied at Chelsea School of Art, from 1978 to 1981, and then at Goldsmiths College from 1983 to 1985. During the 1990s, the subject of sport and, in particular, horse racing, was the source for a number of his works. His successful shows at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Serpentine in London contributed towards his selection for the Turner Prize in 1995, which was won by Damien Hirst. His works were also included in the controversial, but seminal, exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, which was held at the Royal Academy in London in 1997. His Ecce Homo, a life-size statue of Christ, was displayed on the ‘empty plinth’ in London’s Trafalgar Square over the turn of the millennium. In 2001 Wallinger represented Britain at the Venice Biennale exhibition of international contemporary art. In 2007 he was awarded the Turner Prize. In 2009 he won the Angel of the South competition and his work, a giant white horse, was installed in the landscape at Ebbsfleet in north Kent in 2012.

Places

Subjects

horse-racing, jockey, sport, conceptual art

Materials & Techniques

linen, oil, oil painting

Artist

Mark Wallinger (1959 - )

Title

Brown’s (Mr P.J. Brown)

Date

1993

Medium

Oil on linen

Dimensions

height: 110.00 cm, width: 110.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Anthony Reynolds Gallery, November 1997

Inscription

none

GAC number

17284