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Galerie Nicola von Senger AG
Limmatstrasse 275
Zürich
+41 44 201 88 10
Olaf Breuning, Hello darkness
November 3-December 22, 2007

After Olaf Breuning’s solo show at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, comprised of new drawings photographs, sculptures, and video, Galerie Nicola von Senger presents Hello Darkness, an installation that dates back to 2002, but unshown in Switzerland. Previously exhibited at the Swiss Institute in New York (2002), Magasin Grenoble (2003), and Bregenzer Kunstverein (2004), it is Breuning’s latest installation to date.

Hello Darkness is an important work in the artist’s oeuvre. The elements typical of Breuning’s early work that quickly earned him recognition, first in Switzerland and then internationally, come alive in a concentrated manner. The entrance to the installation is a hole smashed into the gallery wall creating passage into a monumental remix of contemporary cultural fragments. Breuning’s horror / shock aesthetics, deliberately amateurish production, his use of copies and quotations, and mixing sounds and images from popular culture meet a subject that has had numerous incarnations from the medieval dance of death over the poem by Matthias Claudius to the film by Roman Polanski: Death and the Maiden.

Breuning most recently made use of this motif in his exhibition at Migros Museum. Woman and Death shows the protagonists on a see-saw. A happy, rosy-cheeked, blonde girl outweighing a pathetic, helpless skeleton humorously tips the balance of this dance of death in favor of life. Hello Darkness serves up a more somber version. A dark room replete with ominous music, a smoke machine, and stroboscope is reminiscent of a nightclub. A coffin, skeleton, and axe evoke a haunted house and B-movies. A cell phone ring tone echoes the sound of everyday life. Breuning’s maiden does not have a virginal innocence as in the paintings of Hans Baldung but is instead presented as a state-of-the-art sex doll. Already lying in a luxurious coffin she holds an axe in her hand which might explain both the hole in the wall and the havoc that has been wreaked across the room. She communes with death — a plastic skeleton from anatomy class sitting on a heap of dirt. The substitution of protagonists with commodities, the maiden’s malice and the innocuous plastic death, take the drama out of the story and replace it with a post-religious allegory that takes place in a limbo (between life and death, reality and fantasy, between the genuine and the artificial). This allegory concerns less body and soul than a cultural moment — a moment which seems to quote Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle: “In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.”

— Gregor Staiger, October 2007