ON BIRGIT BRINKMANN’S OEUVRE

Birgit Brinkmann trained as a sculptor at Frankfurt’s renowned Städelschule under Thomas Bayrle and as an artist is as well-versed in handling small and seemingly unobtrusive creative pieces as she is in creating larger-scale works. One field of her work hinges on the careful observation of objects that seem to have completely set properties and functionality and yet in her hands acquire surreal qualities that are highly unsettling to the eye, are joyfully playful, and are forever testing our sense of reality. They include plinths for dogs, underwater stilts, and walking sticks whose tips morph into balls and which do not provide support bit instead test the angle of the ground beneath them. Metaphorically speaking, this applies to all her Dadaist utilitarian objects – they do not serve as support but rather to enhance our sensitivities.
Birgit Brinkmann’s oeuvre is in essence sculpture but in her installations and her two-dimensional pieces goes well beyond this. The montage aspect of the latter, and her repeated spatially layered works such as her ensembles using acrylic glass, not only have multiple references but in particular bring to mind the history of photography, for example Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series of winding towers, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes or Alfred Ehrhardt’s sandscapes from North Sea beaches. She combines this with traits of Japanese aesthetics and thus a special reflection on transience. Given that they are linked to autumn as a season, they also embrace the fullness of nature and it shapes.

Spatially staggered works in glass take up this principle to create perspectival montages that lend the respective overall image a sense of inner movement. Particularly refined are her works in textiles that are layered over the natural shapes of fine branches or meld in two-dimensions. The motto for these pieces is also taken from other materials. From the fissured lines of porous soils through the branches of leafless trees and bushes or cable spirals through to the skeletons of technical structures, Brinkmann pursues the overarching question of the shape of things. Finally, there are her landscapes which present historical distance and yet eschew any denunciating gesture of decay. These are mnemonic images that go deeper than some mystification of the past would allow.

In all its aspects, Brinkmann’s oeuvre pursues a search for common ground between natural and artistic shapes. On this basis, she develops an impressively unique artistic phenomenology that resists the restrictions imposed by conventional meanings.