on the way to the leisure center

A woman lies with her back to us, her body rippling with swirls of green, blue, and yellow that seem to twist and flow like something alive. Glenn Brown painted this in 2000, and it hides a clever secret: it borrows its pose and composition from a 1917 work by the German artist Lovis Corinth. Brown made a habit of reworking older paintings and giving them a strange new charge. The wildest part is the paint itself. Those thick, churning brushstrokes are pure illusion. Up close the canvas is completely flat and smooth, with none of the texture your eyes expect. Fooling viewers this way was one of his signature moves.

Then there is the title, "on the way to the leisure center," which sounds almost like a joke and has no clear link to the sleeping figure at all. That mismatch is very much on purpose, since Brown loved names that puzzle people or make them grin. His near-psychedelic colors turn a traditional nude into something lovely but slightly unsettling, as though the body is melting into swirling energy. Nominated for Britain's Turner Prize, Brown built a career on work like this, which keeps raising a tricky question: if you copy another artist and transform it, whose art is it really?