Björn Braun Untitled (Nest), 2009 mixed media 15 x 15 x 11 cm
“A Piece of Heaven” 27.03.-07.05.2010
“A Piece of Heaven” is the first solo exhibition by Björn Braun in our gallery Karlsruhe.
Björn Braun’s artistic works are created from a process of transformation: in a Synthesis of adding and removing the artist generated images, collages, objects, and spatial structure, which circulate between natural and artificial origin shape. Paper, wood, fibers and feathers form for brown substance, which he considered in various forms and subjects with the inclusion of literature, industrially produced textiles and found objects in nature, a pictorial discourse. The economy in the use of the materials used by him appears here as the origin of its conceptual, minimalist formal vocabulary, the artist with an anarchist gesture - on the move and adjusting a familiar tunes - down converted to abstraction.
In his current exhibition sets Björn Braun focus on the design of form and space by natural and cultural as well as landscape and architectural concepts in correspondence to each other represents. Thus, the artist shows in the front room of our gallery a result of bird nests, which are formed by two zebra finches Contribute. Within a few weeks ago, the artists have placed the birds of different materials such as grasses, wool, jute, synthetic fibers or wire coated with colored plastic building material available from which linked the different birds’ nests. The intended von Braun specification of the material has so guided in the design process of each nest tissue at a specific appearance of the object, and thereby formed a series of multicolored body out between plastic and aesthetic shape and circulate naturally functional design.
In the second room of our gallery Bjoern Braun is the idea of the mesh away from human culturalized and natural habitats. Here the artist has made a direct intervention into the architectural space, as he has replaced a narrow, horizontally oriented windows against a plate molded from birdseed. The hardened and form brought food mass is just as ephemeral scale, and, as a constructive element of the space, which only deals with the interaction of the outer space living birds - by eating the food - that permeates from Brown inserted membrane between inside and outside. The dissolution and Forming a given spatial structure and pictorial perspectives thus becomes even Björn Braun’s collages in image object. Serve as a model the artist illustrations from local literature of the 1950s and 1960s, from which Brown chooses black and white or colorful illustrations. In the cut and re-assembling of specific fragments of the artist designed this new, the image inherent logics: Sun shows one of these collages flanked by apple crates distance, with Brown that the picture boxes ordered fruit partially removed and as a structural element - namely, as one in image space as a flight line on top - now integrated. In a manual installation of the image, which he affixes the result on the inside of the spine as an image carrier, united Björn Braun, a history of documented with a fictional-specific state, and linked this interweaving of time and space to a synthetic, self-referential imagery.
The medial reformulation of an image is similar in crucial Björn Braun’s new monochrome panels. For this purpose, the artist has chosen two thematic books, which he transformed into a separate process of boiling and then scooping the paper on two screens, and has arranged horizontally one above the other. While the upper surface bluish image was created from a book on the heavens, the bottom, beige-colored surface gives a lecture on such a book, which describes an earthly Landschaftszug. The title of “North Wind White valley” refers here to speak on each of the references used and the composition of the image, the size of the rectangular image area corresponds to the thickness of each book. The visibility of individual letters of the text, decomposed, and the whereabouts of large paper fibers, runs through a leaf with a procedure based on random structure, which in turn generates an abstract landscape.
The meeting of the two image surfaces evokes, however symbolically a horizon line, which combines both image space and, as it separated from each other. The visualization of a no (longer) visible, but is as abstracted image expressed the room finally haptic in the plastic Spechtbau concrete. The artist has an empty Spechtbau - one is proposed in a hollow tree trunk - with poured gypsum and then removed the wooden sheathing of the nest. What remains is to send a negative form of coins from the bark of woodpecker building, which performs the original function of this bird shelter and breeding ground for the absurd. While in the original nesting habitat only by the removal occurs - and thus a counterpart to the first exhibition space running, plastic nest construction - leads Björn Braun here the viewer much more, a double negativity in mind, which manifests itself as a sculptural object in space and the space to speak so vividly sketched in question.
-Christina Irrgang
