Stefan Brüggemann often produces bold interventions into the history of art, reinventing the formal language of Minimalism and Conceptual Art of the 1960s to communicate the concerns of contemporary society.
Red (Hyper-Poem Lockdown) belongs to a series of paintings that the artist created during the extensive lockdown that unfolded as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and extends his formal and conceptual engagement with the medium of language. Within the series, the poems conceived uniquely for the project are inscribed on glowing surfaces created from layering gold leaf on wood. As combinations of short, powerful statements, the poems resemble the language that circulates within the Internet, as in the examples of “unsubscribe,” “forget this device,” and “playback free speech.”
By evoking the banality of the language encountered within the online sphere, the artist questions the logic of late capitalist media culture, while the familiarity of words used within Brüggemann’s poems hint at the inevitable role played by the Internet within the 21st Century.
