The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
Olaf Breuning arrived in Australia for the first time in July 2006 to exhibit ‘Home’ at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane. The exhibition was part of a joint project with the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney and was co-funded by the Pro Helvetia: Swiss Arts Council who supported the show travelling from Brisbane to Sydney and later on to Gertrude Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne. The exhibition at the IMA was coupled with an installation by Queensland artist Sandra Selig who presented a new work in the adjacent galleries.
To my mind, Olaf Breuning is one of the most interesting and innovative visual artists working today. His practice highlights the entrenched discursiveness of contemporary art, finding inspiration from fashion, film, advertising, music and any random aspect of everyday life. His appreciation of the seemingly dumb, and preoccupation with rhetorical forms of critique made me think of the legacy of such artists as William Wegman and Richard Prince who, like a lot of artists that they influenced after the 1980s, are situated somewhere between the ‘conceptual art’ and ‘post-pop’ labels. The familiarity that Breuning’s visual collages evoke, their sheer watchability, belies an astute understanding of a variety of visual codes. His great skill is in the way the intelligence behind the construction of the work does not beg to be recognised. The playful sense of humour that his work emanates is passively absorbed by the viewer and often deflects the complexity behind its informal appearance. For the IMA exhibition the artist produced a new work titled Miss Loot which consisted of various cheap, faux tribal objects (bought at the Loot home wares store) arranged to form a kitschy and primitive-looking... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline