Artists: bn+ BRINANOVARA
Exhibition title: Lieber Maler, male mir
Venue: The Address, Brescia, Italy
Date: December 2, 2023 – February 4, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and The Address, Brescia
The Address is pleased to present, from December 2, 2023, to February 4, 2024, Lieber Maler, male mir, the first solo exhibition at the Brescia gallery by the artistic duo bn+BRINANOVARA.
The exhibition consists of a series of unpublished works created by the artists for the occasion.
Paying homage to the German artist M. Kippenberger’s eponymous series, the Milanese duo reminds us that in art, as in everyday life, mutual collaboration, confrontation, dialogue, control, and self-control are necessary characteristics for creating a meaningful overview. Similar to the German artist, the Milanese duo’s approach to making art is undoubtedly something unorthodox, unconventional, far from the idea of the artist as a solitary genius.
The conception and realization of bn+BRINANOVARA’s paintings develop by resisting the “Gesamtkunswerk” and the imposition of a monolithic, totalitarian, and reductive model.
The decomposition of each element produces a new and different order that leads to a contemporary idea of mannerism.
The technical and expressive quality of image elaboration, layering, and reinterpretation allows the artists maximum openness to the language of art history and past iconography. The exhibited series of works becomes a space-time journey that questions our connection with history.
Starting from ancient civilizations such as Hellenic and Mesopotamian, traversing the classical age and Renaissance painting, the artists arrive at a present recomposed from almost forgotten memories, where everything is questioned through a complex polycentric and unresolved vision in which even the raison d’être of painting itself ends up being targeted. A parody of the opposition between abstraction and figuration, iconography and iconoclasm, the contemporary painting of the Milanese duo reflects its importance, originality, and truth.
Through this engaging reinterpretation of history, bn+BRINANOVARA guides the viewer’s gaze into the harmonious chaos of uncertainty. Spatial coordinates, temporal planes, and styles such as abstract geometry, colorfield, German expressionism, Italian pop, and digital avant-gardes are anarchically reimagined as a musical fugue within a score.
Colors on the canvas sensually and playfully intersect with striking yet balanced juxtapositions. Brushstrokes and sinuous lines take over from material and pasty layers; metaphysical-flavored fetishes hide among marked overlays of acrylic, oil paint, and spray. In this poetics rich in known pictorial styles, a battlefield for the attentive eyes of the observer, the artists move in an unprecedented and sentimental expressive symphony.
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The duo bn+BRINANOVARA, formed in 2017, is composed of Giorgio Brina (Milan, 1993) and Simone Novara (Milan, 1994). The former studied at the Brera Academy, while the latter studied at the Polytechnic of Milan and Wimbledon College of Art in London.
Recently finalists for the Cairo Prize (2023), the Francesco Fabbri Prize (2022), and the Lissone Prize (2019), they have exhibited in international galleries and museum institutions.
Among their main solo and group exhibitions are the Civic Gallery of Trento, MART (2023), Giovanni Bonelli Gallery (Milan, 2023), The Address (Brescia, 2022), Crag Gallery (Turin, 2021 and 2019), XPinky Berlin (Berlin, 2022 and 2021), Dimora Artica (Milan, 2021 and 2019), Casa Testori (Milan, 2021), and the Contemporary Art Museum of Lissone (Lissone, 2019).
Among their numerous activities, they have also given lectures at international institutions such as the Mariann Steegmann Institute-Kunst & Gender in Bremen, Germany (2021).
Since 2023, they have become part of the prestigious Italian art collection Maramotti.
