ART CITIES:Zurich-Stefan Brüggemann
Born in Mexico City, Stefan Brüggemann is part of a young group of artists working in Mexico today that has attracted much recent international attention for their irreverent, radical, and often collaborative approaches to art production. He works with and through established systems of institutional critique and conceptual art, but alters their canonical approaches to art production to allow ambiguity, irony, and play to enter the works.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive
Stefan Brüggemann in his solo exhibition “TAKE, PUT AND ABANDON” at Hauser & Wirth Gallery in Zurich, presents new and recent paintings and sculptures. In the exhibition are on presentation works from the series “Joke and Definition” and “Cartoon” paintings, “TEXT PIECES” and the latest iteration of his best-known “Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies”, all of them exemplify his sharp manipulation of language. Shown alongside these painting and wall works are a group of stainless steel readymades. The title of the exhibition takes inspiration from the artist’s process of appropriation. In “Trash Mirror Boxes (after MV)” (2016) the artist has commandeered the joke played by Meyer Veisman’s “Trash” (1991) and Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’artista” (1961). The work emulates cardboard boxes bearing the print of packing tape and when stacked in groups they are reminiscent of cartons left in a warehouse. The word “Trash” is scrawled across each carton, but rather than denoting the contents, this label refers to what is reflected, the viewer and the room it inhabits. “Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies” is an ongoing series that the artist began in 2010, and new variations are shown in the exhibition, “Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies’” (2016) is conceived with the same methodology. Sentences taken from current news headlines are merged with the finishing lines of popular films and spray-painted in aggressive orange, white and black graffiti onto a wall of mirrors. The texts blur reality and fiction, functioning as a microcosm for the state of the global media today. This is the first time that the mirrors appear in 3D form, wrapped around the central pillars of the gallery space. In the new group of ”Joke and Definition” paintings, Brüggemann brings together Joseph Kosuth’s series “Art as Ideas” (1966- ) and Richard Prince’s “Joke Paintings” (1985– ). “Cartoon paintings” is a body of work never seen before. Brüggemann has appropriated a satirical cartoon drawn by American artist Ad Reinhardt in the late ‘50s. The original drawing mocks the common reception of Abstract Expressionism, the first frame of the cartoon shows a banker looking at a Jackson Pollock painting saying “Ha ha ha, what does this represent?”. In the following frame, the animated painting points back the banker, responding with ‘What do you represent?’ Brüggemann pastes multiple inkjet prints of the cartoon onto white canvas before adding small but expressive brush strokes in black oil paint and ink. Brüggemann sees these works as a reflection on the contemporary Internet culture of ‘ctrl + copy + paste’, a phenomenon inconceivable at the time when the cartoon was first published. Three minimalist steel sculptures provide another dimension, “Outdoor” (2016) is an appropriation of Donald Judd’s large-scale revolving door sculpture in Marfa TX, a lightweight stainless steel door rotates continuously in its frame, removing its function entirely. “Trap Door” (2017) emulates a trap door as you find on the street in a city like New York or London, and similarly, “Exit Door” (2017) looks like the fire exit of an urban building. These two works build on the concept of the readymade and for the artist are “Generators of doubt”.
Info: Hauser & Wirth, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Duration: 1/4-20/5/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11;00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.hauserwirth.com
