Andreas Bräunsdorf

Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso were avowed role models, and one occasionally thinks one recognizes echoes of Dresden traditions - Otto Dix, Hans Jüchser, Peter Herrmann, A. R. Penck. These are big shoes to fill, but Andreas Bräunsdorf does not have to follow in them, he has found his own way of dealing with the figurative. His apparent realism plays in its very own way with imperfection, with the rough, the imprecise and there is always something irritating, a melting, a fraying, a small rebellion against gravity or what we generally think we know as visible reality.

What at first glance may seem awkward, even dilettantish, is a conceptual decision by the artist, a deliberate rebelliousness towards the domesticated and cultivated districts of accepted art. Bräunsdorf's figures seem untouched and unmoved by the zeitgeist, his interiors are located in suburbs and outlying districts, around which all gentrification processes undauntedly make a wide berth. By resorting to the power of the pictorial, the coarse and a less opulent palette of colors, he deals with the topos of alienation. His figures do not wear fine threads, but rather their shirts open or their sturdy upper bodies exposed; they have nothing to do with the glitter of the performance and status society. Andreas Bräunsdorf intersperses his objectivity with recurring mysterious objects and structures, allowing them to tilt slightly towards the surreal when viewed as a whole. In this way, he creates a distance – at best reflective – to the viewer, opening his inner gaze to the unspoken, the repressed, the essential, the eternal.