Andreas Bräunsdorf

Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso were, by his own admission, his role models, and one occasionally thinks one can detect echoes of Dresden traditions – Otto Dix, Hans Jüchser, Peter Herrmann and A. R. Penck. These are big shoes to fill, but Andreas Bräunsdorf need not follow in their footsteps; he has found his own way of dealing with the representational. His apparent realism plays in a wholly unique way with imperfection, with the rough-hewn and the imprecise; and there is always something additionally unsettling about it – a blurring, a fraying, a small rebellion against gravity or what we generally believe we recognise as visible reality.

What may at first glance seem clumsy, even amateurish at times, is a conceptual choice on the part of the artist, a deliberate defiance of the domesticated and cultivated realms of accepted art. Bräunsdorf’s figures seem untouched and unmoved by the spirit of the times; his interiors are set in suburbs and outlying districts, which all gentrification processes steadfastly give a wide berth. Drawing on the power of the pictorial, the rough-hewn and a rather austere colour palette, he explores the theme of alienation. His figures do not wear fine clothes, but rather have their shirts open or their sturdy torsos bare; they have no interest whatsoever in the glitz of a society driven by achievement and status. Andreas Bräunsdorf intersperses his objectivity with recurring mysterious objects and structures, allowing them to veer slightly into the surreal when viewed as a whole. In this way, he creates a distance from the viewer – one that, at its best, is reflective – opening the viewer’s inner gaze to the unspoken, the repressed, the essential and the timeless.