Desastres

Alke Brinkmann (*1967) is a painter and as such she presents herself in the exhibition "Desastres" at the Gallery Parotta Contemporaroy Art, but the way in which Alke Brinkmann presents herself is rather uncommon. The Berlin Artist mixes paintings of varying formats and styles to present a room-filling installation. Far away from the conventions of customary exhibition practice, where each piece is neatly separated from the other on neutral walls, each claiming its own individual place, here painting is presented as a simultaneous spatial sensation. None of the paintings, whether pocket-sized portraits or large scale landscapes, stand by themselves, but instead communicate with others around them--partly by physical proximity but often even through the overlapping of two paintings as well as through thematic inferences. Intersections create connections across the room and allow closeness. The artist shows a series of portraits, for which she researched photo media depots. The dead Uwe Barschel, slain Palestinians, the ex-KJB agent Alexander Litwinenko, who was killed with radioactive poison, the picture of the atom bomb, Lee Harvey Oswald (the alleged Kennedy assassin), as well as many small blurry portraits of the victims of September 11th...

As if surfing on the internet, the observer follows the supplied links and-with the help of his own depot of images, creates connections-or doesn't, because the associations are only offered to those who recognize the individual images. This might be easy with the atom bomb but gets more difficult with the Tsunami victims or the KGB agent Litwinenko. And who of us knows the faces of the dead of the World Trade Center, whose portraits haunt the World Wide Web? That Brinkmann has decided to paint their portraits blurry is only consistent as the entire arrangement presents a kind of unsettling openness. Somehow one suspects the histories that each of the portraits carries within, somehow everyone breathes the catastrophe--even the artists' sleeping daughter Adele seems to conjure up the image of the "sleeping brother," death. Emotive communication between the painted image and the observer is what Alke Brinkman calls her artistic exploration, a communication that lies underneath the level of information as if subcutaneous and which points to the painted icon. In the case of the painting of the atom bomb over Hiroshima it is the overlapping layers of white paint, which can be interpreted far off of the representative dimension--the painting as a trigger and metaphor of a collective trauma simultaneously. Her portrait of a child without a face functions the same way. The omission as productive emptiness that allows the memory of all the nameless dead that cannot be captured by language and therefore remembered. It is especially in the pointing out of this gap, in the productive space in-between, what the pictures represent and what the pictures actually are of, where the exciting literal sense of Alke Brinkmann's installation lies.

Text: Anja Osswald, Translation: Sinje Ollen-Fisher