STEFAN BRUGGEMANN AT FRAC BOURGOGNE

For his first solo show in France, Stefan Brüggemann (born in 1975 in Mexico City) has brought together a selection of works which subversively upset the rules of the art game, in particular, here, those governing representation and its content.

Stefan Brüggemann’s proposition is as paradoxical as it is provocative, in the way he plays with artistic codes, the better to reduce them to nothing. Art history tumbles into oblivion in favour of the surface of images. For example, he uses typography, but in order to deny the artistical reference thereto, typography also making reference to communication methods. The nihilist posture comes across in an often seductive way, ensnaring the spectator in his/her own art culture.He describes his praxis as TWISTED CONCEPTUAL POP, an association that is nothing if not paradoxical.

The exhibition is constructed in three areas. A small entrance room is painted all in black, with, on the floor, a pile of posters with white wording printed on a similarly black ground—references to minimal sculpture and political art which Stefan Brüggemann one more activates the better to underscore the uselessness of all political ambition in art, along with all content-related dimensions.

Two rooms echo each other on either side. Five reversed mirrors, facing the wall, are shown in one room, and five sentences made with black adhesive lettering are written on the walls of the other room. The sentences are very representative of what he has been developing since the mid-1990s : to deny today’s norm of the "all-communicational", where everyone is summoned to explain, comment, and elucidate, until the cows come home. Stefan Brüggemann sets up a language of refusal, often negative postulates affirming void, absence and impossibility. The texts he has chosen here are provocative in what they proclaim.

The five mirrors turned towards the wall echo the five texts, as if in the negative, and assert the refusal of their function. Nothing can be reflected in them. No images. No ideas. By reversing the mirror, Stefan Brüggemann denies this relation between art and reality, and art and the viewer. The mirror also shows the simultaneity between work and viewer, present value, and value of the conscious presence of the world, which Stefan Brüggemann here seems to empty out: FROM ANYTHING TO ANYTHING IN NO TIME, he writes on the exhibition wall. As part of real, the Internet is a work source for the artist, so its time-related reality can be summoned up. Because no information on it can ever really be deleted, all the information on it is mixed with an almost indeterminate time-frame.

As a perfect reflection of a world where tomorrows no longer lay any claim to sing, the work seriously delivers the truths of the day, fuelled by the works of conceptual artists, pursuing the forms of negativism which marked 20 th century art, forms involving the end of myths and beliefs, including those of creation. The works refer at times brutally to the society of disappointment that is ours, setting the individual face to face with him/herself in a world with no geographical or temporal landmarks, a world that is globalized and purposeless.

The Stefan Brüggemann show (curator : Eva González-Sancho) is a joint project put on by the Frac Bourgogne (Dijon – FR) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Bern – CH).

open from Monday to Saturday from 2-6 pm, except public holidays

Guided tour - Saturday November 22 th 2008 - 3 pm at the Frac - free entry

A catalogue has been published by jrp/ringier (Zurich - CH), jointly edited by the Frac Bourgogne (Dijon) and the Kunsthalle Bern (Berne, CH).

Frac Bourgogne
49 rue de Longvic
F - 21000 Dijon
http://www.frac-bourgogne.or