Giovanni Kronenberg

Renata Fabbri Gallery, Milan

11 February – 28 March 2020 

Renata Fabbri announces Giovanni Kronenberg’s second solo show at the gallery. The exhibition includes a series of new drawings and sculptures, most of which have been conceived specifically for this project.

Since the early stage of his career, Kronenberg’s work has been characterized by a tight relation between sculpture – interpreted through a deeply physical approach – and drawing, which anticipates, re-iterates and expands upon its peculiarities as well as its ergonomic, tactile and transcendental features. Throughout the years his drawing practice has become more and more important in the work of the artist: since his use of pure graphite, which used to define the works on paper until few years ago, recently Kronenberg has started to explore colour in compositions of sinuous forms, suspended and free from spatial connotation.

These mysterious figures and the sculptures share an ungraspable materiality, caught in a dimension that is abstracted from time and space. Hard to identify, some of them recall natural structures in progressive ramification – like crystals, gems, sea sponges or precious granites – all materials that Kronenberg has often used in his sculptures, drawn to their properties of self-germination and extension into space without following any narrative direction or chronological handholds.

In recent years, the artist has started using the 22-carat gold leaf, as a characteristic element of the drawing and the sculptures. This passage seems natural considering Kronenberg’s frequent use of precious materials such as silver, malachite, ivory, agate, rock crystal and porcelain. The gold leaf brings his drawings closer to the immobility of the Byzantine aesthetic and in particular to the icons, sharing with them the isolation and the centrality of the image, as well as iconographic timelessness and transcendental characteristics.