STEFAN BRUGGEMANN, CONCEPTUAL JOKES: KOSUTH OVER PRINCE AT YVON LAMBERT, PARIS

press release:
Stefan Brüggemann November 25 – January 14, 2012

Yvon Lambert is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Stefan Brüggemann. This is the artist’s third solo show with Yvon Lambert.

Stefan Brüggemann’s work focuses on contrast and contradictions. His practice is concerned with how and where mediation might occur, rather than placing an emphasis on the separateness of opposing positions. This is especially the case with language, which powerfully shapes and directs our existence. Language is envisaged in Brüggemann’s practice as a fluid medium whose objects, structure and ideology are in a state of constant alteration.

In this new series of work, entitled ‘Untitled (Definition and Joke Paintings)’, Brüggemann brings together Joseph Kosuth’s series ‘Art as Idea as Idea’ (1966-) and Richard Prince’s ‘Joke Paintings’ (1985-). Each work combines a single Joseph Kosuth definition with a Richard Prince joke, maintaining the scale and composition of each, as previous defined by these artists. Kosuth and Prince have both appropriated and repositioned language through existing tropes: the one referencing philosophy, or high culture, the other humour, or popular culture. Brüggemann’s provocation in bringing together the pop and the conceptual sees an irrefutable confrontation of irony and logic.

Elegant and decisive in a formal sense this new group of paintings is nonetheless wholly and unequivocally conceptual. The artist’s intention is to relinquish all formal decisions to his sources. These references are not used as quotations, rather, Brüggemann appropriates them in a literal, wholesale fashion, as a kind of physical and intellectual material, which is not refashioned but remains the same. Brüggemann’s reappropriation of existing works and their linked concepts allows him to present conceptual art in an ever more liminal space, stripping his own decision making to bare functionality. Paradoxically, as he approaches dematerialisation, the works resulting from this process of elimination maintain a lush and striking presence.

Stefan Brüggemann (b. 1975, Mexico City) lives and works in London and Mexico City. He has exhibited internationally at some of the most visionary institutions and private collections throughout the world. He has had solo shows at the Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion, Barcelona; the Kunsthalle Bern and the ICA, London. He has been included in group shows at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; the Fundacion Serralves, Porto; La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal.