In the Studio With Artist Olaf Breuning: Laughter in the Dark

It is a beautiful day in late winter, and the Spring thaw has finally come to the Hudson Valley. In the Kerhonkson studio of the visual artist Olaf Breuning, light streams in, illuminating the colorful array of sculptures and canvases he is currently working on. Everything is smattered with paint: the floorboards and walls, the interior of the bathroom, his iPhone case, and even his jeans. But looking closer, I see there is order in the chaos. The Jackson Pollock-like paint effect is too finessed to be accidental and has been added deliberately for the aesthetic.

I think you know you’re in the company of an artist by how they treat their environment. Artists cannot help but make art of the world they inhabit. They bleed into the spaces they occupy. I admire this quality in them, but it also makes me feel lazy by comparison. Then I remember my friend Catherine – a fellow writer – whose London apartment is spilling over with books and dirty dishes and all kinds of messes, and I realize that the instinct to beautify is not something artists do to stay busy but to satisfy a deep inner need.

Visual ugliness seems to offend artists in the same way that linguistic ugliness bothers writers. It’s why I feel an extra repulsion at the brutishness of the current political moment because of the defilement of language that has accompanied it. It seems natural that my conversation with Breuning will stray into political waters. Like me, he is a European (Swiss) who finds himself living in America at a time when the traditional alliances appear to be breaking down.

He came here three decades ago as an up-and-coming visual artist, picked up by New York galleries after a series of successful shows in his native Switzerland, and has lived the last 16 years in the Hudson Valley. America has been good to him. He has built a life and a career here and has been a significant name in the New York art scene with group shows at the Whitney and MOMA and public art commissions for Central Park. I ask him if he feels a responsibility to respond to what is happening in his adopted homeland right now through his Art.

“No, no, no,” he says emphatically. “Art should not be bordered by politics. For me, art is really something universal. When something bothered me politically, I would sooner organize things and do things. I would not produce an artwork to be hung in a gallery on a white wall so people could admire it while drinking champagne next to each other. That seems pretentious.”

This view of art as something above the fray of politics and aspiring to more universal themes is partly a result of the privilege of his upbringing, Breuning admits. “I always say that Switzerland is like the country club of the planet,” he says. “You can grow up with a sense of innocence that is not possible in many other places.”

“Breuning’s work always feels in on the joke and invites you to climb in too,” says Sara O’Keeffe, senior curator at Art Omi

This sense of innocence is present in a lot of Breuning’s work. His photography, which was how he first caught the attention of the art world, often includes staged images featuring visual gags, and his hand-drawn sketches are frequently captioned with phrases that act like surreal punchlines.

“Breuning’s work always feels in on the joke and invites you to climb in too,” says Sara O’Keeffe, senior curator at Art Omi in Ghent, which is currently exhibiting Breuning’s “Clouds” sculpture, a public artwork he originally created for the entrance to Central Park. “Breuning’s work sets up tableaux for visitors to enter spaces of play,” adds O’Keeffe. “I think it’s perfect for the Hudson Valley, a region that holds many fictions and fantasies of America.”

But the apparent levity in his work is deceptive, and beneath the playfulness, there are deeper truths he is gesturing towards. A good example of this is a photo he made last year called “Generation.” The image features a row of people ranging in age from a toddler to a very old man, each holding cardboard placards bearing single words that in some way represent their life stage. Most poignantly, the signs held by the toddler and the old man (played by Breuning’s 95-year-old neighbor) read “Hello!” and “Goodbye!” respectively. Breuning says he was always interested in the “big universal questions” about “humans in general and our relationship to the universe.” Growing up in the protective bubble of Switzerland – a country that has famously maintained political neutrality for more than 200 years–he says he had “the luxury to think about life and death, and the things that Shakespeare would think about,” in a way that might not have been possible if he had grown up surrounded by conflict or poverty.

And yet, it would seem to me that in present-day America, reality is pressing in in a way that is hard to ignore. Can an artist really stay above this current political moment without risking irrelevance? I tell Breuning – perhaps to rile him a little – about Harry Limes’s famous speech in The Third Man, where he criticizes Swiss neutrality as a form of creative death. “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,” says Limes, in a speech penned by Graham Greene and delivered by Orson Welles. “In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The truth is, Breuning is fully aware of the artistic limits of the cosseted life he grew up in. It is partly why he left. The stark binaries of America have always attracted Breuning precisely because of the contrast they offer to the homogeneity he came from. “Difference is beautiful,” he says. In terms of modern culture, he says, “The extremes always originate in America and then Europe adopts them.”

When he was growing up, these cultural extremes drew his attention as much as the philosophical tradition of Europe from which he emerged. As much as art history, he found himself imbibing MTV, hip hop and John Carpenter films.

“When I look back at my first 10 years of creating things, I was definitely climbing a ladder inspired by all these different influences,” he says. “It was only maybe when I was 25 that I started to develop a distinctive personal language where I was not being inspired by these influences so much as by the world.”

The art world of the 1990s into which Breuning first emerged was a vibrant scene dominated by a post-modernist sensibility that seemed intent on creating as much shock as possible. Conceptual artists were stretching the boundaries of what was possible in an artwork, courting controversy and making themselves millionaires in the bargain. It is an era (for better or worse) best remembered for the British artist Damien Hirst’s decision to preserve a dead tiger shark in formaldehyde and put it in a gallery.

“Artists were taking the language of popular culture into the art world,” says Breuning. “I was one of the first at the time who took the horror film aesthetic into my art.” As with all his work, the horror elements that found their way into his photography were always imbued with a comic touch – blow-up dolls sporting vampire fangs; a zombie with bread buns for fingers. The success of his photography led to gallery shows around the world and financial success. While he says the money went to his head at first, he remained very Swiss in his extravagances (he bought a Rolex watch).

When he hit 40, he left the city for the Hudson Valley. Like many city exiles, the biggest positive change associated with the move Upstate has been the impact of living in such close proximity to the natural world. “Nature took me in,” he says. “Living here I feel more part of nature than I did in The City.”

Unsurprisingly, this inner shift has had an effect on his artistic output. Despite his avowed ambivalence towards political art, the climate crisis is something he has felt moved to tackle in his work. Later this year, he will go to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, as part of an educational exhibition he has created, Plans for the Planet, that seeks to teach children about the natural world. In this new work, he sees for himself “a mission,” which he insists is not political but “part of something bigger.”

But even when tackling a subject as serious as the climate crisis, his customary humor always finds its way in. An example is an exhibition he produced for Los Angeles’s Sidecar Gallery last year, Sad and Worried Animals, which features large-scale sculptures of pocket-sized animal carvings that Breuning discovered during a trip to Peru.

As with so much of his work, the exhibition is both comic and poignant, with the big-eyed animals all gazing skyward apprehensively as if in anticipation of what is to come. In the sad and worried animals, we are invited to see ourselves: fretting over a future we can’t predict, tender in our vulnerability and always somewhat absurd.

“Humans come in all variations and shapes,” says Breuning. “Some of them are nice, some of them not – some of them like this, and some like that. What do I know? Einstein said, ‘Two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity; I’m not sure about the Universe.’”

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Follow/Connect with Olaf Breuning via Website | Facebook | Instagram
Photos courtesy of Olaf Breuning
An INSIDE+OUT featured story by Paul Willis @pwillyart

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See more of our IN THE STUDIO WITH… Artist Series:

In the Studio with Multimedia Artist David McIntyre

In the Studio with Experiential Artist Amanda Russo Rubman

In the Studio with Bespoke Ceramicist R.A. Pesce

In the Studio with Artist Elizabeth Keithline

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