Fernando de Brito

About Fernando de Brito

Psychograms are what Fernando de Brito calls his ballpoint pen drawings. Countless lines interweave to form highly complex, abstract drawings, representing a visual equivalent to the diverse range of information that gives us an impression of a person. Is this kind of portrait a creative act? What does creativity really mean anyway? Is it sometimes better to not be creative? What do kitchen towels and Marquesas have to do with it? And how does this all relate to the concept of the “artist as a seismograph”?

Fernando de Brito was born in Portugal in 1956 and has been living in Hamburg since 1969, where he studied painting and sculpture at the HFBK University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. In the 1980s, he first worked as an assistant of Giuseppe Bertolazzi in Genoa, then for Kenneth Noland in New York. His works are represented in the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Spiegelberger Stiftung, among others. Among his recent exhibitions, he also participated in the Manifesta 12 in Palermo.