Olaf Breuning

“Mr. Breuning specializes in relentless satire that sends up all manner of visual and social conventions: television, sports, bad movies and worse rock bands, as well as fairy tales, creation myths, tribal rites (past and present and mostly male) and, naturally, contemporary art. His New York debut offers an installation, a video and eight large colour photographs, and it progresses from abysmal to promising.”

This is how Roberta Smith, critic for the New York Times, welcomed the first exhibition by Breuning. Right after the dramatic events of 09/11, the exhibition put forward an exorcising of fear and of the culture of the “entertainment factor”.

The text that came on the cover of the issue 71, 2004 of Parket stated: “Fanciful figures they are, those youthful creatures who stare at us out of Olaf Breuning’s photographs and videos. And yet their sectarian looks, their air of dishevelled arcane knowledge, trash archaic civilization and marketing slavery, communicate a disturbing sense of gruff exclusion.” These are surely relevant comments even when describing the famous video “home”, presented in 2008 at Whitney Biennial, NY.

Irony is the instrument that Breuning uses to observe reality, as it were for the first time, and the act of production of a work and of the meaning of creativity. It is in this perspective, for example, that he creates the installation Clouds (2014) at Central park where he introduces the use of a color that looks as much fake as iconic in those shiny aluminum clouds, a sculpture without volume, as in a comic imagery; but also the gigantic mural he produced at Zentrum Paul Klee (2013) with a geometric grid that ruled that bombs of color thrown by the public.