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, internationallyrenowned 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.



Ironia – Temporalità – Déplacement

Take 3D Tour