Eigen+Art

Birgit Brenner

10 May - 15 Jun 2012

Exhibition view
BIRGIT BRENNER
Alles auf Anfang. Bitte.
10 May – 15 June 2012

Birgit Brenner's works set in where the banalities of everyday life begin.

Unemployment, loneliness, status symbols and social decline or the fear of aging are topics that recur continually in her room-filling installations. With everyday situations the artist addresses very familiar societal fears in scenes that take place in inner monologues of the protagonists or between couples. What do we believe in today? Do prayers help or rather a plastic surgeon?

The cinematically told stories are spread like fragmented stage directions also over her expansive collages which she develops out of the installative works in a space and condenses in the two-dimensionality of the collage to a sequence, a multi-cross-faded still. By the means of drawings, photography and text, Birgit Brenner not only assembles diverse media on one surface, but also multiple realities as quickly-sketched pictures of the monotony of daily life up to the collapse. The works appear nearly overloaded, pieced up from fragments that don't seem to match at first sight but still they tell a story that the viewer can decipher in a different way time and again deprived of any hints to the identities of the protagonists.

The magnitude of information one is simultaneously bombarded with thanks to the means of modern technology is both a blessing and a curse for Birgit Brenner. A blessing, because one gets immediate access to the desired information, a curse because one can neither filter nor proceed the lot. This may lead to a lack of empathy, exhaustion or the possibility of manipulation through the generation of fear.

Birgit Brenner addresses this issue with the principle of collage, in which most diverse pieces and parts of information randomly concur, overlap, cover or complete one another. In Brenner's collages this happens using raw materials such as brown cardboard, tape, staples and markers.

The scenes of everyday life Birgit Brenner has worked into the collages in her current exhibition "Alles auf Anfang. Bitte." (All back to start. Please.") turn around gold chains, tuned up cars with sports rims to the packaging of hormonal drugs prescribed against
 

Tags: Birgit Brenner