Olaf Breuning
Olaf Breuning - color me, 2017
Série n°3
Semiose éditions
What an odd Noah's Ark the artist Olaf Breuning has chartered! Each pair of animals is made up of one who is happy and smiling and their partner who is sad and wears a frown.
Kissy lips or a closed expression, a broad grin or an ugly grimace, there isn't always much of a difference between the two but that's the magic of drawing: a line that curves up or one that curves down and the animal's personality changes completely.
It's exactly as if we were looking at smilies!
Olaf Breuning
Olaf Breuning was born in 1970 in Switzerland and currently lives and works in New York. Humour and borrowed popular culture are the only invariables in a production that takes in all possible available media. His body painting in the colours of Pollack or Klein, group photos of people wearing smiley masks, his home video relating the misadventures of a crazy New Yorker. Something of a freak, and not always in the best of taste (Like the cinema of his mentor, John Walters), his art fights against cliché and normality comes out with its hair ruffled up. Beware, one of his sculptures about the modern world prophesizes, too much thought endangers your health. His work his been exhibited at the Paul Klee Museum in Bern (2013), the Swiss Institute in New York (2012), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2011) and at the Whitney Biennial in New York (2008). It can be found in international and French collections (Bourgogne FRAC, Pompidou Centre, Paris).