You will find The Brown Collection in a Marylebone mews not far from the Wallace Collection. With its name and location, painter Glenn Brown cheekily suggests that this personal museum of the art he collects, plus his own creations, is on a par with London’s famous gallery of rococo paintings and ancien regime clocks. The joke works best on your phone map where you can see how close they are.
The current exhibition Hoi Polloi is curated by Brown and supposedly looks at representations of “the ordinary man” in art. It’s a satirical nudge at claims to social worthiness by public galleries for there is zero purpose or theme here, just a mixing and merging of the curious and eclectic in fascinating juxtapositions over four floors of a luxuriously restored building that even has a gothic cellar reminiscent of the one in the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Here you can be spooked by one of Gillian Wearing’s lifelike masks.
