17/10/2003
Olaf Breuning
Magasin, Grenoble
The exhibition brings together an important set of works (film, video clips) organised around two of his main installations 'Hello Darkness' (2002) and 'Apes' (2001).
Olaf Breuning's exhibition brings together an important set of works (film, video clips) organised around two of his main installations 'Hello Darkness' (2002) and 'Apes' (2001).
'Apes', shown for the first time at the Kunstverein Friburg, reminds the viewer of a film set or the scenery for an anthropological reconstruction of the prehistoric age. In the darkness, the set of soil planted with trees and shrubs shelters different groups of big apes, man's supposed ancestors, who are illuminated from time to time by the flames of the fire around which they are grouped.
The installation 'Hello Darkness' was shown at the Swiss Institute in New York (2002) and at Arndt & Partner gallery in Berlin (2003). It consists of a life-size sex doll lying in a coffin, holding an axe in her hand who is confronted with a life-size plastic skeleton. These elements combined with darkness, earth, a destroyed library, a fog machine, strobe lights and the melody of a mobile phone, make reference to horror and action films, clubs and pop concerts, and form a modern version of perhaps the best-known motif from medieval dances of death :Death and the Maiden.
Olaf Breuning's works use state-of-the-art technology with shock effects from the entertainment industry. They feed off cliches from the media and popular culture, they are both 'failed' and accomplished, fake and in bad taste, creating a universe of artificial realities and cited artificialities.
In his interviews Olaf Breuning often cites Doug Aitken, the early works of Matthew Barney, film-makers John Carpenter and John Waters as influences.
Opening Saturday 18 October at 6 pm
Image:
Vampires, 2002
Photography, 122 x 155 cm, C-print, mounted on aluminium and laminated
OLAF BREUNING
Born in 1970, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Lives and works in Zurich and New York
MAGASIN - Centre National d'Art Contemporain
Site bouchayer-Viallet - 155 cours Berriat
38028 Grenoble cedex 1 - France
Tel. +33 (0)4 76 21 95 84 / Fax. +33 (0)4 76 21 24 22