Olaf Breuning: Ugly

by Olaf Breuning (Photographer), Dorothea Strauss, Markus Stegmann

Films, television, advertising, video clips, and computer games--all are fair game and useful material for Swiss artist Olaf Breuning. In his photographs, videos, and installations, Breuning engages with the reality of the vast array of media that surround us incessantly, day in and day out, appropriating narratives, images, and characters to create unforgettable and eerily familiar hybrids. Through unlikely medleys that juxtapose such disparate elements as the accoutrements of occultism, new-age fads, and vampire films, mixing together disgust, sweetness, kitsch, horror, levity, and gravity, Breuning shows that nothing is too sacred or profane to warrant inclusion in one of his playful, weirdly subtle compositions.

Hardcover

First published April 15, 2002