Thorsten Brinkmann Herne, Germany, b. 1971

Thorsten Brinkmann (b. 1971, Germany) features traditional motifs of both photo assemblage and photography while employing the languages of classical representation and modern abstraction. Staging photographs that deconstruct photographic representation into fields of shape and color that nonetheless “represent” the narrative he is telling. Like his collected material, art history for Brinkmann is something to work with. He plays freely with codes of common memory-evoking tropes with sly feints and nods to what signifies “Portrait” or “Still Life.” One could say he gives a “new life” to found objects and that by using them in a completely new context, these objects take on a different meaning. Through this process, he points to the story of representation itself.