Troy Brauntuch

Gisela Capitain and Friedrich Petzel are delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by Troy Brauntuch at Capitain Petzel, Berlin.

Troy Brauntuch started his career as one of the group of highly influential artists including Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Philip Smith, Matt Mullican and Sherrie Levine, who studied under John Baldessari at California Institute of the Arts and became known as the Picture Generation after the groupshow ´Pictures´at Artists Space in New York in 1977. As one of a generation of young artists who where addressing the new mass-media saturation of the post-war USA, the ,Pictures´artists were forming a new direction after the reign of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism. Brauntuch´s exceptional talents as draughtsman, which would have seemed counter to the current rejection of traditional media, gave him however a unique subject matter – he chose to make conceptual works about this paradox.

Some of the images in the exhibition formerly existed only as the foundational sources for early photographic works and canvases. Others combine to form uncanny relationships, not unlike the space between recognition and knowing presented in Brauntuch´s canvases. Subjective notes describe things actually made as well as unrealized objects. A collection of handmade rubber stamps in various forms of use are presented, imbued with a range of pictures – from the public, appropriated, history laden, to the private idiosyncratic and sentimental. A suite of seven new canvases plays off these temporal shifts with light on their inert subject, in this case couture gowns from the 1940s and 50s, luxurious, intricate garments rendered painstakingly by the artist in chalks.

„Over the years, Brauntuch has presented so many moments: big and small; his own and the world´s. A dead pit bull on the sidewalk, shot after an attack, the fur on the top of its head soft, vulnerable. The Pan-Am disaster in 1990. The Long Island Rail Road Shooting in 1993. Sarajevo. Empty shoes. His wife, in 1984, sleeping. A dry-cleaning shop window. A handprint. If the list seems incongrous, some elements of it less easy to figure with precision than others, there is nonetheless an uneasy alliance between them, a palpable resonance that has to do as much with what´s not being shown as what is offered to the eye.“ – Johanna Burton, Familiars: On the Work of Troy Brauntuch

The work of Troy Brauntuch is in many prominent public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and he was part of the recent exhibition „The Picture Generation“ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A comprehensive monograph spanning 30 years of the artist´s career with essays by Johanna Burton and Douglas Eklund will be published by JRP/Ringier concurrently.