Galleria Fumagalli presents the third exhibition in the series MY30YEARS – Coherency in Diversity, conceived by critic Lóránd Hegyi to pay homage to Annamaria Maggi’s 30-year career at the helm of the gallery. The 8 exhibitions feature recurring themes and surprising connections between 12 artists – followed or represented by the gallery – whose research is placed in different contexts. Each show of the series offers a dialogue between 3 artists on a specific topic, avoiding any conceptual imposition, and letting the works retain their own individual meaning.
The themes Ironia – Temporalità – Déplacement (Irony – Temporality – Déplacement) serve as a meeting point between works otherwise generated from different reflections. Critic and curator Lóránd Hegyi presents an unprecedented dialogue between multifaceted American master Dennis Oppenheim, internationally-renowned French couple Anne & Patrick Poirier and the gallery’s new proposal, German artist Thorsten Brinkmann.
Showing a severe criticism of contemporary history, politics and social transformation, Anne & Patrick Poirier pursue a radical and ironic reinterpretation of history and mythology in order to bring their metaphorical meanings to life and connect them to contemporary attitudes.

The selected works offer sharp, provocative visual messages that ironize ancient metaphorical narratives and generate a déplacement – a shift – of meaning. The iconic sculpture “Janus” (2017) combines a modern moving record player with the ancient iconography of the two-faced Janus, yet remodeled in a very personal way. The sculpture shows the half heads of Anne and Patrick fused together as a symbol of their symbiosis, in their life and work, and also of their capacity to look simultaneously at the past and the future, at memory and contemporary times.
Renowned for his experimentations in the context of Land Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art, Dennis Oppenheim emphasizes – especially in his most recent works – the anthropological contextualization of artistic praxis, focusing on certain attitudes and psychological orientations. The works on view, created from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, are colored pencil and oil pastel drawings made with a quick and genuine touch which have further inspired the creation of sculptures. These drawings are from a period when Oppenheim experimented with the creation of large public sculptures characterized by the use of everyday forms, to which he adds electrical mechanisms, movement, lights, sounds, pyrotechnic effects.

The object is, thus, distorted in its purpose and meaning, provoking an effect of psychological and intellectual estrangement in the viewer.
To conclude the triad, Thorsten Brinkmann reveals a personal strategy to ironically reconfigure visual reality. His work – which in this exhibition is manifested through the photographic medium and found objects – takes inspiration from both the classical European tradition and the modern avant-garde. The viewer inevitably finds images and concepts that are part of a shared cultural background, yet their unlikely association generates disorientation and new possible meanings. Nonetheless, through this ironic approach to traditional materials, Brinkmann questions the relationship between contingent relevance (that is, temporally representative) and basic anthropological realities.

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Thorsten Brinkmann →

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Anne & Patrick Poirier →