Jenny Brosinski written by Max Presneill
Jenny Brosinski is a Danish artist based in Berlin. I decided to write about her as I personally feel her work has a similar aesthetic to some of my own paintings and because I feel she successfully manages to deal with a form of painterly minimalism with a freedom and exuberance that I can only rarely attain.
She integrates gestural abstraction, text, spraypaint and collage on larger scale canvases, and other support materials, to conceptually engage with both the nature of the materials being used, the methodologies of interpretation and a construction of meaning. Misleadingly simple in appearance her paintings utilize household cleaning supplies in conjunction with art materials to produce art works that are highly complex, in aesthetic sensitivity, formal composition and intellectual rigor.
Reductivist in identity they still overflow with potential. They are in the act of becoming, a liminal state between what the artist has left and what we finish by observing. The paintings track their own process of construction while revealing very little directly. One needs to actively engage with interpretation, making the viewer an accomplice rather than a passive onlooker. This self-reflexive awareness of the artist-at-work presents not a fait-accompli but the knowledge of the on-going and potentially disastrous results of this kind of work. It reflects its own risk taking. It is brave work.
Aspects of production become part and parcel of the painting - what to add, when to stop working on it. This helps us to understand this as an experiment. A trial and error process, not picture making with a pre-decided image being created. The titles, as well as imbedded textual elements on the picture plane of the work, sometimes display what seems to me a sense of humor and often personalize the painting - both rejecting our easy entry to their meaning, reminding us that a forever distanced subjectivity is our lot - but also linking us to possible readings, of acknowledging the relationship between word and image.
They trace their own organic growth and so mirror ourselves, our lives, time passing and therefore a state of entropy and aging. Their mark-making and gestural brushstrokes emphasize her presence and thus our own mortality is recognized and looks back at us, while they still seem somewhat joyous, to celebrate that they are.
Bold color and generous movement pull our visual attention in and the subtleties of mark keep us there. There is a playful unconsciousness revealed here but this does not reject the art-historical interaction that her conscious and learned knowledge also brings to bear. Although the artist is seeking an emotional response from the viewer, which she deftly achieves, she also demands an intellectual one too. Her relationship to the history of abstraction is apparent. Her differences from it too. The deliberately awkward scrawls may reference the scratchings of children but they are a sophisticated realization of the power of marks, their presence in our lives from birth to death, from doodles to graffiti, from poetry to documents and declarations. Hers are non-specific but ever present.
In the end they hold an optimism for me. They are an endless possibility. They are potential - they are fluid, transient, a self aware moment in a stream of alternatives and avenues of investigation. Her art is always fascinating to me and an inspiration.
For more information on Jenny Brosinski, please visit: jennybrosinski.com