Space To Listen Jenny Brosinski
Jenny Brosinski’s exhibition Space to Listen at Ruttkowski;68 in Paris emphasizes the pauses in between actions and gestures and embraces the tension in her paintings and sculptures. She pushes the artistic process until she feels her art is finished.
By searching for spaces where the senses can rest or are overstimulated, she forces us to listen. As the composer and artist John Cage states: “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” In Brosinski’s paintings there are no coincidences, just the careful placement of forms and lines, which sometimes shift and are on the verge of imbalance.
Through the use of raw, folded or crumpled canvases, the perfect placement of every gesture, form and color, and the expansion of the surface to show all states of materiality, the artist deftly controls her works. By balancing out the number of lines needed for spatial illusions, Brosinski reinvents abstract painting. In her work we can see parallels to Cy Twombly’s poetic paintings; it is also reminiscent of the Surrealists’ écriture automatique and children’s drawings. In addition to paintings, her exhibition features animal sculptures with human traits such as a vomiting fish and a vunerable unicorn. They make us pause and compel us to confront their emotions as well as their assertion of their own space.
In the artist’s work art history is transformed into a contemporary dialogue. Brosinski shifts our perception by inspiring us to imagine that we can smell what we see and see what we hear. If we open up, we can perceive and sense that her paintings are a space to listen.



