Curators Maurizio Cattelan & Marta Papini
OAF Curated Space
I Wish I Could Speak in Technicolor:
Visions of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
Curated by Maurizio Cattelan & Marta Papini
Halley's Comet, 1910
On May 20th, 1910, Earth passed through the Halley comet's tail, the only comet regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and thus the only naked-eye comet that can appear twice in a human lifetime. For the first time, the short-period comet’s approach was documented through a photographic process by the scientists in the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Some of its stardust might have settled on the newborn Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, born on July 31 in Wisconsin that same year.
Forty years later, on April 19th, 1954, another extraordinary phenomenon was spread to the world through Life magazine’s cover, where unclassified color photographs of the US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands were published. For the first time, the immense red mushroom cloud made its official appearance in popular culture.
Until that moment, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's relentlessly artistic vein had found his outburst in shooting black and white photos and color slides of his wife Marie (born Evelyn Kalka), taking inspiration from the aesthetics of contemporary pinup magazines. In the thousands of photos shot with different floral print backdrops in the same little house, Marie interprets and plays with several roles and stereotypes: from undressed seductress to the glamorous Hollywood star, to the crowned queen of remote land.
But starting from 1954, the photos of those nuclear tests in full color impressed Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's fervid imagination to the point that to the photographic lens he would prefer the Masonite boards or pieces of cardboard taken from at the bakery where he worked. Over the next decade, by using his fingers, sticks, combs, cardboard, leaves, crumpled paper, and even brushes made of Marie’s hair, Von Bruenchenhein painted apocalyptic and surrealistic visions, invented creatures from the deep sea, yet-to-be-discovered galaxies, vibrant colored fireworks, and cities taken over by lush extraterrestrial plants.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Untitled, 1940s
Hand-colored gelatin silver print
10 x 8 inches
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Time Produced Non Better (Self-Portrait), 1947
Hand-colored gelatin silver print
Courtesy John Michael Kohler Arts Center
9.875 × 8 inches
At the pace of about one a day, between 1954 and 1964 Von Bruenchenhein wrote a logbook in form of paintings, creating almost the impression of a narrative. His journey, at first inspired by the nuclear tests’ photos, would then go down through the lenses of his microscope and the discovery of mysterious organisms in a drop of water, up to the sky again, that he managed to explore through the lenses of an astronomical telescope he bought in 1957.
In the painting dated May 5th, 1956, the destroying power of the nuclear bomb is evoked through the representation of multicolored concentric circles looming on an arcaded city panorama, about to be pulverized by the hypersonic impact, as imagined by many sci-fi movies of the time.
On January 1st, 1957, two teethed creatures whose appearance seems inspired by Chinese dragons intertwine their tails to navigate a dense clouded liquid populated by other organisms, in a symbiotic relationship that seems to resonate with the kinship evoked by Donna Haraway 60 years later.
Von Bruenchenhein studied botany, and often stated he was a horticulturalist: between September 1st, 1959 and June 1st, 1960 he would paint a vast series of tentacular beings drifting in a colorful-dripping-outer space that recalls the drawings of invertebrates and plants represented by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in Art Forms in Nature in 1899.
In the same way Ridley Scott envisioned an Earth’s progenitor in his 2012 movie Prometheus, Von Bruenchenhein dedicated a whole series of his paintings to what he would call the First World, a planet which he believed split off from ours during cataclysmic event eons before. The last painting in the exhibition closes the cycle: on April 12th, 1960 the devastating power of the nuclear bomb is again the undisputed protagonist of Von Bruenchenhein’s preoccupation, depicting a huge inflamed detonation.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 535, Jan 1, 1957, 1957
Oil on masonite
24 x 24 inches
If it is true that this immense body of artworks requires a contemplative way of being, especially because they imply navigating through hallucinatory images of an inner intimate world, its titles, by clearly stating the specific day on which they were created, suggest a more conceptual level of reading, to the point that one could suppose that this archival impetus can be seen as a way to examine chronological time and its function as a measure of human existence.
Von Bruenchenhein engaged his personal mythology with new – and very contemporary – shared fears of a planetary catastrophe. His artworks reflect the influences of the micro and the macro, and, by combining the individual visions with the global events, testify how an individual lifespan forms a part of human history.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein died in 1983: Halley’s comet would make its return to our sky only three years later in 1986, but, through his art, he was able to envision its next passages for the centuries to come.
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Atomic Age (No. 887, December 4, 1960), 1960
Oil on masonite
24 x 18 inches
Collection Joshua Rechnitz, New York
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Wand of the Genii, Nov 5, 1956, 1956
Oil on posterboard
22 x 28 in / 55.9 x 71.1 cm
$65,000
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 877, May 30, 1960, 1960
Oil on masonite
24 x 20 in / 61 x 51 cm
Collection of KAWS
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 795, April 10, 1959, 1959
Oil on masonite
24 x 24 in / 61 x 61 cm
Collection of KAWS
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 775, Jan 9, 1959, 1959
Oil on masonite
24 x 24 in / 61 x 61 cm
Collection of KAWS
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 811, June 19, 1959, 1959
Oil on masonite
24 x 24 in / 61 x 61 cm
Collection of KAWS
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
No. 849, Jan 6, 1960, 1960
Oil on masonite
24 x 24 in / 61 x 61 cm
Collection of KAWS
Not for sale
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Untitled Album, n.d.
Photo album with collaged elements containing ballpoint pen works on paper
20 x 20 x 2 in / 50.8 x 50.8 x 5 cm
Price on request
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Untitled (No 23), c. 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
15.25 x 17.75 in / 38.7 x 45 cm
$12,000
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Untitled (Sept 18 - 65), 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
14.25 x 18 in / 36.2 x 45.7 cm
$12,000
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein (1910 - 1983)
Untitled (Sept 19 - 65), 1965
Ballpoint pen on paper
14 x 18 in / 35.6 x 45.7 cm
$12,000
Outsider Art Fair Paris
Atelier Richelieu
+1 212 337 3338
info@outsiderartfair.com
outsiderartfair.com
