Jenny Brosinski at L21 Gallery

Artist: Jenny Brosinski

Exhibition title: Feels good til it doesn’t

Venue: L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain

Date: June 4 – July 17, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and L21 Gallery, Mallorca

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with land surveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
Gilles Deleuze

Like the art of cartography, Jenny Brosinski’s work depicts the problems of scale and conversion. Firstly, this can be seen in the scale of the canvas itself. Her large formats allow you to appreciate the gestures of risky decisions that leave their mark on the raw canvas with no room for turning back. A line on a map determines how the world is said.

Secondly, the scale of the body provides the real reference to size, the element that connects the canvas to the world. It is also the inescapable unit of measure, the only one that, in the artist’s studio, can determine the size of the painting. There where the outstretched arm can reach: that point is the limit of the territory. And the territory always invites us to explore it. Jenny Brosinski starts painting on the floor, even when dealing with small formats. This is where the exercise of conversion takes place, of translation if you like, of the line and the mark to their contained shapes, of the gesture to its measured and controlled force so as not to overwhelm the surface, which is reconfigured with each of the artist’s new interventions, losing its balance to later encounter it by surprise. The body is therefore not only the unit of measurement but also that of force and energy, which is later released, in different degrees to shape fleeting landscapes.

Lastly, it is also necessary to take note of the scale of the world. The inability to grasp it is manifested in language. Words appear on the canvas without giving any clues as to their meaning, and do not represent rather present themselves to the viewer. What is the reference in them? What do their indications point to? In Jenny Brosinski’s paintings, words swing within their form: calligraphy and their meaning, always open.

The resulting works can therefore be read as maps of mental and emotional states, cartographies of imaginary and conceptual landscapes that are transposed from the world onto the canvas, passing through the body as a medium of translation.

Jenny Brosinski (Celle, 1984) is based in Berlin. She holds a Meisterschüler postgraduate degree (2012) at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee.

Recent solo exhibitions include Catch me if you can, Choi & Lager (Seoul), Come on and take the rest of me, Ruttkowski68 POP68 (Cologne), It only makes it worse to live without it, Plus-One Gallery (Antwerp) and group exhibitions at Galerie Kremers (Berlin) and Pablo’s Birthday (New York), among others. Her work is part of public collections like MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea) and the Public Collection of the City of Gothenburg (Sweden).

Jenny Brosinski, Feels good til it doesn’t, 2020, exhibition view, L21 Gallery, Mallorca

Jenny Brosinski, Untitled, 2020, Mixed media on paper, framed in aluminum and oak wood, 44.5 x 33 cm

Jenny Brosinski, Joe the pig, 2019, Oil, charcoal and graphite on canvas, 360 x 300 cm

Jenny Brosinski, There were plants and birds and rocks and things, 2020, Oil, charcoal and olive oil on canvas, 360 x 300 cm

Jenny Brosinski, He bent his knees and kissed the sun, 2020, Oil and oil stick on canvas, 205 x 195 cm

Jenny Brosinski, As long as I’m here, no one can hurt you, 2020, Oil, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 200 x 180 cm

Jenny Brosinski, Horse, 2020, Oil, oil stick and graphite on canvas, 200 x 180 cm

Jenny Brosinski, Iron, 2020, Oil, oil stick, charcoal and spray paint on canvas, 200 x 160 cm