Hyper-Conscious: STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN & ON KAWARA

This exhibition brings Stefan Brüggemann’s Hyper-Palimpsest and On Kawara’s Today series together for the first time. The works share a central concern in their engagement with the experience of time and being in the world. 

Where Kawara’s work explores these ideas in series, developing his investigation from one canvas to the next over the course of a lifetime, Brüggemann works on a different axis. His engagement with these questions is a layered exploration that belies an archaeological sensibility in its emphasis on depth and its invitation to the viewer to dig down into the work. Brüggemann’s work requires that the viewer spend time unearthing and piecing together its fragments, while Kawara’s work plays with the fragmentation of time revealing the deeply arbitrary nature of the symbols and systems that we use to codify it. 

Between these axes of contemplation and immediacy we can chart the hyper-consciousness of the modern self: caught in semiotic structures that fragment our experience and leave us to search among the pieces.