Enrique Brinkmann: the poetics of silence - picture preview

A retrospective of Spanish artist Enrique Brinkmann will open in London this week as the inaugural show at a new contemporary art gallery.

It is a show of firsts: it is the first exhibition being held at new 3,000ft space, the Rosenfeld Porcini gallery in Fizrovia, founded by Ian Rosenfeld and Dario Porcini; and it is the first UK-based solo exhibition of the Spanish artist’s work.

The 40 Brinkmann pieces span the last half a century. Works produced in 1960s Franco-controlled Spain use his trademark monochrome palette while later examples show his evolution away from figurative abstraction in paint and ink toward the adoption of metal mesh surfaces in the 1990s.

The adoption of this new medium proved to be a watershed in his oeuvre. “What I painted previously was based on a placing of points and lines around the space of the canvas; now I am able to achieve it in real space, in the air.”

Works from the late 1990s to 2002 display intense colour on the transparent mesh surfaces, but from 2003 purity of line becomes predominant.

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The poetics of silence: a retrospective of Enrique Brinkmann opens at the Rosenfeld Porcini gallery on Thursday