BERLIN.- Jenny Brosinski’s paintings are cool, serious, and at times funny, but also fragile and moving. How can all of this be true at the same time? This is why the artist chose to be a painter: The medium allows her to accommodate these different qualities in a single work. The surface holds several decisions taken over time, giving them a silent stage. The individual steps that make up the painting – a circle of blue, an apparition in white, a cross in red – are clearly visible; you can trace every move. There is no attempt to take away what has been done. There is hardly any painting, you would almost say, considering the limited amount of elements that form the composition and the generous space around the motifs. There is a constellation of lines, and colors. In this theater of reduction, each step carries the weight of a main act.

A Clean Slate

The open, blank canvas remains visible in every work, and you cannot help but think about a clean slate, both as a background and as a metaphor. Yet the surface is not hard white; the fabric is slightly beige, gray, or brown. It is unprimed and shows the traces of its material production. On this empty field, every painting appears to articulate a new beginning, the birth of color, a statement in a few forms. Yet, in terms of art history, such a new start is hardly possible. Brosinski came to work in the 2010s in a field where many stylistic and conceptual approaches were available, none of them dominant. A silly cartoon could be just as valid as an existential color-field painting or some scribbles suggesting a morse code from the soul. Brosinski took a mix of such elements to articulate her own path. Dialogue with existing positions was and still is a part of that journey, and requires precision in seeing what is akin and what is different. She appreciates the open space around a motif, like in Martha Jungwirth’s paintings, but not the fast, expressive brushstroke. She likes the sensibility of Cy Twombly’s handwriting but is not looking for a mythological context. Thus, her work has developed as an act of differentiation. Objectively, there was no clean slate at all, rather a dense field of positions, which makes it all the more interesting that her work is nevertheless able to evoke such a fresh feeling.

Signature

There are a couple of gestures in each work, made with hands, palette knife, oil stick, or brush. Most of them are rather contained and considered – unexpressive, you might say, even though it is hard to imagine a line or mark as not being an expression of some kind. This is not the work of an artist who pours out her feelings, but rather that of someone who takes things in and holds a thought to chew on it for a while. If there is an expressive incentive underneath the painting, what we get to see is the containment of it, a slowed-down and reflected version. The focus is on putting things into place, creating a dynamic equilibrium, in which verbs such as falling, diving, rising, passing, or flying can help to indicate the action. Gravity is all around, but in ambiguous ways. Nuances express themselves in the application, in just a quick gesture of the hands, the more accentuated movement of a knife, or the pointedness of a stick. If there is a kind of “handwriting” in this approach, it is one of an artist who wants to bring things down to the essentials, and to filter out the specifics of stories and the immediacy of emotions.

Abstract Figuration

Whether the artist takes a motif that can be faintly recognized or not (is that a bird, a drone, a pair of eyes, a table?), the point is that all motifs have been looked at with an abstracting eye, and they come to us in a reflected, modified way. A lot of the shapes have an organic feel – they could be human, animal, or plantlike. But – and this is relevant – the artist does not finish the sentence that she starts, in terms of form or identities. She does not go in detail about the character of a fragment. Basically, she treats a figure in the same way that she treats a dot or color field. The painting is about the co-existence of such fragments, some with and some without human traits. Abstraction is not just a style here, but also an operational aspect of painting, paving a way in the work which enables the viewer to connect the dots and find coherence between disparate parts.

Negative Space

After every mark made, it seems that there has been a pause to consider the next move. The space in the painting stands for the time that is taken to make the forms and consider if something else is needed in between them. For the viewer, it creates a mental space to consider the motifs from different angles and find out if there is a certain sequence in looking, or a center around which the movement happens. The artist cherishes the negative space – the part that has not been defined – to support the marks that appear in the positive. Canvas not touched. Gestures not made. Figures not delineated. Words not finished. Pulling the brake is an important part of the paintings. One could also remember the title of the artist’s comprehensive monograph, Things I’ve Never Said (2024). At times, with all of these negations, it may feel like the artist is working against herself – that is, against her impatience, her immediate reactions, against the obvious one would want to do if painting were merely acting something out. Painting is not necessarily fun or easy, and that is where it becomes meaningful, the work being a product of both a strong drive to make, and resistance and containment, all of which produces an alert tension.

Size Matters

How do you accommodate parts of yourself in a painting, without making some self-important gesture or macho pose? For Brosinski, the gesture with the brush can be associated with the ego, with “big male painting” as we know it in all its variations – artists who believe in the gesture of the genius as the main actor of a work. That is not her approach. Instead, she creates a space where vulnerability can exist, where mistakes can happen. Where slight nuance is the highlight. She often does this on a big scale, which may seem like a contradiction. You do not choose such sizes if you are shy or insecure. But here the play of forces comes in, the dialogue with existing notions of painting. Can she come as a female painter in the 2020s with such big-sized paintings, without making big-balls art? Can you show big-time fragility instead of bravado?

Encounter

The paintings are on alert; they always look a little tense. They are not unlike human beings. They speak to the viewer in terms of energy and presence. We meet with them, have encounters in a short glimpse, read gestures before words are spoken. The titles give an additional entrance to the paintings, maybe a less obvious path that you had not yet taken: “It’s always teatime,” “Flying Cow,” or “I wouldn’t bother.” The title sets a tone or suggests pinning down an image or story. Serious and casual, precise and loose, the paintings keep sending different signals that do not necessarily match. Their visual language, with scratches and wipes has a streetwise quality that makes them accessible and immediate. Yet they also aim for the temple of high art, where gestures are weighed, balances are checked, and paintings only pass the test if they keep the grace of form intact over a longer stretch of time.

Jurriaan Benschop