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Breuning, Olaf
Olaf Breuning (born in 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland) lives in New York. His photographs, videos, sculptures and installations often make reference to familiar myths, stereotypes and cultural fantasies common to mass media. His works are elaborately staged to create visually fascinating and compelling narrative scenes. They feed off clichés from the media and popular culture, as well as various forms of the leisure industry, creating a universe of artificial realities and cited artificialities. Rather than denaturing a ‘real’ image by making it seamless, Breuning takes on real places with the most primitive means possible. Critical of what he regards as the overcodification of much recent art, Breuning immerses himself in pop culture to ensure that his own work remains accessible. The artist emphasizes a continuity between daily life and the artificial worlds of fashion, film, TV, and leisure, and thus opens up a variety of individual readings that refuse one single, coherent truth. Breuning often travels to sites around the world to find his scenes and to stage his motifs for his large photographic works, from Spain and Switzerland to Peru. He has exhibited widely in Europe, Japan and the USA - with recent solo exhibitions at Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, Mexico; Musée de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France (all 2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2004); Chapter Visual Arts, Cardiff, UK; and Chisenhale, London, UK (both 2005). Breuning has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, USA (2004); the Prague Biennale of Contemporary Art, Czech Republic; and the Jeu de Paume, Paris, France (both 2005).
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