Olaf Breuning is a Swiss artist, with a solid background in photography, based in New York. In his research he is often focused on blurring the line between the categories of identity, self-knowledge and perception.
His humor, always balanced with poignant seriousness, sketches out the relationship between art and kitsch, reality and illusion, authenticity and artificiality. Looking at one of his works, such as The Bosch Fridge (2019), it is clear how the artist’s strong irony pops up between the history of art and the icons of the Western consumerist society. Black Hole in my Garden (2019) is the playful creation of Breuning’s art. This picture takes inspiration from the first image ever captured of a black hole by astronomers, at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy. The news had worldwide echo but within a very short time was swallowed by the massive production of daily news. The artist therefore decided to recreate that shot in his own garden in the attempt to point out the trivialization of our mass media.

Nowadays everybody dealing with images has an Instagram account. Breuning's one is the source of his new work Faces, that will be presented at Paris Photo. The series counts two grids containing a selection from the 900 shots published by the artist himself on his Instagram account: the daily routine of cooking and eating food becomes an occasion to create new visual contents. The large-scale pictures and the small prints become humorous observations of the madness that we call reality.