Homage to James Brooks

Lorenzelli Arte closes its exhibition season 2004/2005 with a show dedicated to the American artist JAMES BROOKS (1908-1992).

The exhibitions will be inaugurated on Thursday May 19th at 6:30 p.m.

On display will be fourteen acrylic works on canvas dated from 1969 to 1972 in which one can detect a clear echo of that “romantic abstractionism”, as defined by American critics, which surely was an inspiration for Brooks.

In the catalogue Valsecchi writes that Brooks is an artist who was “decisively influenced by the two components, romantic abstraction and spaciality”, which seem to characterize American painting since the second world war. This text describes concisely but tellingly the success he held among international critics, as well as the way he was to be received by European critics between the early and mid fifties, in the very years when he became known in the United States.

In discussing Brooks in detail, Valsecchi, in fact, describes how his painting owes everything to these results. His painting being, within his mode of expression, “not a field of colour but a chromatic agglomeration of brilliant tones together with long black shadows or dramatic premonitions” where “the dimension of these agglomerations does not contract in signs but fully expands like a lyrically controlled voice with an extensive timbre, which is another one of his qualities”.

The first one-man exhibition by this artist was held at the Galleria Lorenzelli in Milan, in 1975. Brooks may also be remembered for his participation during the years between the late seventies and the nineties in important collective exhibits in the most important American museums such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. He can also be recalled for his one-man exhibits held in prestigious American galleries, the last of which was the Artemis Greenberg Van Doren Gallery of New York in 2003.

Pressetext

Homage to James Brooks