Stanley Edmund Brouwn (25 June 1935 – 18 May 2017) was a Suriname-born Dutch conceptual artist. His works explored dematerialization. He exemplified 1960s conceptualism. His best-known works include this way brouwn, Afghanistan-Zambia, and BROUWNTOYS 4000AD.

Brouwn was born in 1935 at Paramaribo in Suriname. In 1957, he travelled by boat to Amsterdam, and lived there until his death in 2017. While there, Armando, an artist and friend of Brouwn, introduced him to the Zero movement. Brouwn taught as a professor at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg for multiple years. Brouwn eschewed giving biographical data.

Brouwn died on 18 May 2017 in Amsterdam.

In the early 1960s, Brouwn produced his first works. These consisted of iron and wooden sculpture. He also used suspended polythene bags filled with garbage. Few of these early works have survived, as Brouwn destroyed most of them.

Eventually, Brouwn began to consider the role of the audience in the development of artwork. One of his early works involved the dispersion of paper sheets across Amsterdam streets. The art that appeared upon the sheets resulted from the footprints of pedestrians and tire prints from cyclists.  

Brouwn produced his most well-known work in 1961, this way brouwn. It was both a conceptual and performance art piece that consisted of Brouwn asking passers-by for directions, recording their responses on tape or encouraging them to draw their directions. Such drawings were stamped with text that read ‘THIS WAY BROUWN’. this way brouwn was performed on several other occasions in the early 1960s.

In the 1960s, conceptual art, as well as the Zero movement within the Netherlands was widespread. Brouwn, as a conceptual artist of the movement, had chosen distance and size as his artistic medium:

"More and more people make long flights once or twice a year. The validity of the concept of distance is constantly being eroded. Distances are reloaded in my work, they get meaning again."