CONTEMPORARY artist Glenn Brown is about to make his mark on the art gallery he associates with ‘home’.

Originally from Hexham, he is delighted with the news this month that one of his pieces is destined for permanent exhibition in Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery, a place he knows by heart.

The Laing is the first venue to benefit from the Contemporary Art Society’s Great Works scheme, designed to remedy the absence of work by major British artists over the last 20 years in UK museums.

Glenn said: “The Laing Art Gallery is a very special place, not just because it was there that I first encountered art, but because now, 45 years after I first went through its doors, it is even more full of great art.

“To me, as a painter, it is the North-East’s most important building and collection of art. Museums are vital to the future of any city, as culture can only move forward if it knows where it has been, if it understands its history.”

His piece, In the end we all succumb to the pull of the molten core , will go on permanent display in the Laing in mid-May next year.

Depicting the turning of two heads, one young and one old, it is based on the fusion of two portraits produced originally by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and Andrea del Sarto, using an approach Glenn calls ‘appropriation’.

The lines, drawn in Indian ink and painted with acrylic on panel, merge to form one swirling image.

“ In the end we all succumb to the pull of the molten core was made with Newcastle and the Laing in mind,” said Glenn.

“It is a painting that looks forward (the youth) and looks back (the old man), but they are one and the same, entangled in a complex game of sitting in the present.

“The heads could be trapped in religious ecstasy or they could be in outer space. You might think it beautiful or really rather ugly.

“In the end I don’t want it to illustrate any one idea – I am happiest if it just seems like a complicated arrangement of abstract lines.”

In 2018, to coincide with The Great Exhibition of the North – a two month-long event designed to celebrate the region’s art, culture and design heritage – he has agreed to curate a show of key pieces from the Laing’s collection alongside his own work.

Director of the Contemporary Art Society Caroline Douglas said: “Whilst the Contemporary Art Society is principally known for buying artists early in their career, we are acutely aware that decades of funding pressures have left gaps in collections across the country.

“Future generations will find it inexplicable that through a period of unprecedented international acclaim for a generation of artists working in Britain, so many of our public collections have been unable to collect examples of their work.

“Once a year, through the Great Works scheme that has been established with the support of the Sfumato Foundation, we will attempt to address this situation.”