Art News

Bjorn Braun, Winner of Blauorange 2009, at Kunstverein Braunschweig

BRAUNSCHWEIG.- The installations and paper works of ‘blauorange 2009’ prize-winner Bjőrn Braun maintain a balance between art and nature, the natural and the artificial. In the cultural landscapes of his collages, romantic views saturated with German sentimentality, he only uses the ‘material’ that he already finds in the image. His abstract works, for example, consist of paper that is handmade by ‘recycling’ books by Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter, and his sculptural works pursue a similar logic in transforming material and content. Accordingly, in Braun’s work process nothing can be lost, everything left over must be used, and nothing can be destroyed without something new emerging, as for example in an installation that is being shown for the first time at the Braunschweig exhibition. A simple wooden bench is placed before an abstract work. Looked at closely, the bench is missing a bar from both the seat and the back. Braun has made them into a lands