Stig Brøgger
Suburban Life – Photography as Painting
01 Mar – 06 Apr 2013
Stig Brøgger’s recent photographs include landscapes, toy figures, buildings, neon signs, Christmas decorations, paintings, flowers, earlier works by Stig Brøgger, films and cartoons, travel pictures, images from the Internet, and many other motifs on a scale from the personal to the common and from Barnett Newman to Woody Woodpecker. The photographs are markedly different from each other in colour intensity, picture resolution, technique, and perspective. They alternate between kitsch and critique, between documentary and psychedelia, between suburban sadness and a spontaneous fascination of nature. All of these contrasts are held together in an overall geometric structure that invites us to look for resemblances and overlaps from one picture to the other. The photographic series consist of a total of 44 plates with 6 photographs on each plate. One is reminded of a kaleidoscope where the composition depends on the viewer and where the individual parts can in principle be recombined in an unlimited number of ways. As a whole the photographs resemble a heterogeneous and inclusive catalogue over life in the suburbs in direct continuation of Stig Brøgger’s own life and earlier works.
Next to the photographic series Stig Brøgger also presents a selection of hexagon-sculptures from the late 1960s that were originally shown in the group exhibition Anonymiteter in Lund and at Ungdomsbiennalen in Helsinki. The sculptures embody a particular variant of minimal and object art of the 1960, mainly because of their unsettled position between the circle and the square. For several years Brøgger investigated the hexagon as a shape through works made in transparent and painted versions in materials such as wood, glass and textiles and placed on the walls or directly on the floor. Comparing the sculptures in the actual exhibition one is made aware of a number of oppositions: between opacity and transparency, surface and space, body-scale and model-scale, and between original and copy. Many of these oppositions can also be found in the photographs although they are here reconfigured in more specific kinds of representation. When the largest of the hexagon-sculptures was originally shown in Helsinki in 1969 its surface was partly covered by photographs. In the actual installation of the work the photographs have instead been moved to the walls where they act as a visual horizon for the transparent figure.