Ferdando de Brito (*1956, lives in Hamburg) and Marcus Neufanger (*1964, lives in Schwäbisch Hall) conscientiously devote themselves to developing possible ways of portraying artistic personalities. They use their art to conjure a relationship to the portrayed, to their charisma, their impact and the essence of their work. Whereby the way the two artists approach this subject could hardly be more different. And it is this interesting contrast that the exhibition PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST is presenting at the Van der Grinten Gallery to start off the year 2017, opening on Friday, January 20th at 6 pm, to which we cordially invite you.

Marcus Neufanger—whose works we had introduced in 2014 for the first time in the solo exhibition PORTRAITS, BOOKS, VANITY PLATES as well as in the publication of the same name—presents 40 drawings in the current show that make up the block Titled/Untitled. These cover drawings are also derived from the source material of Neufanger’s extensive artbook library. Artist’s books and catalogues are, since the 1960s, meant to be understood as autonomous works and issued as print editions. To the way an artist is the author of his “work” typographically, aesthetically and as media, or even actually designs it him/herself, apprises us of his thinking, his ideas and his message. Neufanger rightly sees portraiture in this, but abstracts the object book to an image that is readable as a picture but no longer possible to read as a book. Everything else now plays out on the flat picture plane and leads back to the drawing as pure drawing.

Fernando de Brito studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg that, among other things, later included a 1982 assistantship to Kenneth Noland in New York. He has dedicated a portion of his diverse artworks to “seismographic” and at times large-scale ballpoint pen drawings that reveal an inner world where artists meet artists. His drawings betray a highly sensitized cumulation. The initially parallel lines seem to have themselves determined the moment of their impact, their own pulse, so spiritedly, so vibratingly do they yet follow an inner order across the paper, forming a finely woven structure that opens up or deepens the pictorial space. De Brito meets Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman, Elias Canetti or Eva Strittmatter, and each of these portraits is like a cosmos made up of the sum of the facets of the personality that it depicts. Besides these primarily new works, several artist’s books by Fernando de Brito are also on show.