Olaf Breuning
b. 1970
Commingling reality and illusion, authenticity and artifice, barbarism and civility, Olaf Breuning creates photographs, films, sculptures, and installations that draw heavily from popular culture and a collective visual iconography. He combines these contemporary aesthetics with more primal shared drives: violence, sexuality, ritual, and companionship. The divergent impulses collide, often with absurd and hilarious results, as Breuning exploits the thin line between humor and pain. In his 2007 exhibition at Zurich’s Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Breuning employed art transport boxes as supports for his photographs, drawings, and sculptures. The crates and packing material, which also frame the exhibition’s architecture, take on multiple connotations as vehicles of transport and change. Arranged in a plexiglass showcase, dozens of small ceramic pieces, each incongruously fitted with a pair of large cartoonish eyes, comprise The Collectors (2007). These comical figures, mounted on the side of a carton and staring into the exhibition space, conjure comparisons to the collectors who roam international art fairs, frenziedly purchasing and packaging works. In the chromogenic prin…
Films