Over the course of his thirty-year career, the German-born, Brooklyn-based artist’s paintings have taken form primarily in three distinct processes, which he identifies as drips, drills, and reverses. The genesis of the works developed from the artist’s formative question: “What if you take your will out of the equation and just pay attention to process?” Linnenbrink’s skillfully engineered paintings derive from the artist’s exploration of color with attention to the behavior of material.

Linnenbrink blends a myriad of pigments with epoxy resin to create a magnificent formation of colors. The drip process, demonstrated in paintings such as, NOPRESENCENOHELLOIGOTAPLANNOWHERETOGO, takes place when the artist pours cups of pigment from the top of the canvas allowing for ribbons of
color to be interspersed on the surface. The artist repurposes accumulated layers of resin from the drip paintings to form his drills, as seen in immersive works like EXPLAINMYHEART. Dense with evidence of time and labor, Linnenbrink drills into the surface to reveal layers of contrasting, saturated color.

The artist’s most recent endeavor, which also takes painting to new limits sculpturally and coloristically, are his reverses. “Linnenbrink’s reverses take the drills’ use of excavation as a means of producing surprising revelations but instead invert it. For these works, which are classified as paintings but which dip and jut out from the wall at varying points like topographical elevation maps, the artist creates a variegated vinyl mold,” explains Kron.

WEREMEMBEREVERYONE encompasses Linnenbrink’s ongoing investigation into color, material, time, and, his quest for spontaneity. “In all three processes, there is an element of chance that sits in tension with the works’ anti-figurative, gestural appearance.”