Olaf Breuning

Since the late 1990s, this Swiss artist (born 1970 in Schaffhausen, lives and works in New York) has produced quotation-rich works, which refer back to the imaginary visual memory of the West and its pictorial worlds. He has gained recognition through his films, staged photography, and colourful, huge-eyed, infantile sculptures and drawings, which comment on reality in a laconic manner. A primary element in his work is an artificiality, which each presentation and figure composition makes visible and in so doing opens up a large range of reception forms. In this substituting of each original and challenging significance, the image and subject combine to form a motionless, waiting coexistence in a theatrical adult playground of stage effects, upon which the works are arranged, shrugging their shoulders in the absence of a narrative superstructure.

Curated by Heike Munder