Founded by Ian Rosenfeld and Dario Porcini, directors of Italy’s Galleria Napoli Nobilissima, the rosenfeld porcini gallery will occupy a prime location in the heart of the dynamic gallery district of London’s Fitzrovia.
The inaugural exhibition, the poetics of silence, will be the first ever UK show of the Spanish artist Enrique Brinkmann featuring over 40 works that span the artist’s 50 year career; the show will include significant loans from the artist’s personal archive.
In October, coinciding with the 2011 Frieze Art Fair, rosenfeld porcini will present memory, a group sculpture show featuring works by Andreas Blank (German), Nicola Samori (Italy), Roberto Almagno (Italy), Spazio Visivo (Italy), Kaarina Kaikkonen (Finland), Rossana Zaera (Spain), Steve Goddard (UK) and Mar Arza (Spain).
The rosenfeld porcini gallery will have a strong international outlook committed to showing contemporary artists from around the world, but will also draw upon the distinct yet complimentary backgrounds and expertise of the gallery’s two directors with an innovative exhibitions programme. Old Master and Modern shows will occasionally be presented, either monographic or themed, within the context of the contemporary space, exploring a firm curatorial belief in the continuity that underlies the story of art.
For the opening exhibition of our new gallery space, we are privileged to be able to mount a retrospective of over 40 works by the Spanish artist Enrique Brinkmann. This show, stretching back over fifty years, represents a unique, restless yet coherent, journey stretching up to the present day.
The first works date back to 1960, produced under Franco’s shadow. Their monochromatic palette is redolent of the unease and oppression that permeated Spanish society in those years. Although clearly figurative, they display a freedom of line which, over the course of twenty-five years, evolves into pure abstraction.
The 90s sees Brinkmann freeing himself from any traces of figuratism left in his work and by 1998 his stated desire “to find a way of creating air between the wall and the pictorial plane” results in his artistic breakthrough when he begins using a tightly strung metal mesh distanced from the wall as his new painterly surface. The adoption of this new medium proved to be a watershed in his oeuvre, “what I painted previously was based on a placing of points and lines around the space of the canvas; now I am able to achieve it in real space, in the air.” Although never subsequently leaving it, he has continued to experiment with possibilities which it opened up for him.
Works from the late 90s to 2002 display intense colour allied to the transparency the surface gives him. From 2003 a need for silence and purity of line becomes predominant. Even when titles are obviously political (Irak series, 2004), it is now an extremely personal interpretation where the dark areas punctuate line and the mesh’s transparency. Compared to the direct images of the 60s, there is now an exclusively emotional response to the subject. In the following series Segmentos, small squares, each one conceived like an individual painting, are laid over a large part of the mesh’s surface to resemble a grid or musical score.
Brinkmann is still as focused and artistically ‘restless’ as he was as a young man. It is this endless curiosity and passion tied to a unique poetic voice which will ensure that this wonderful body of work will leave its mark and the resonance arising from it will long endure.
