Olaf Breuning creates videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations that investigate kitsch, appropriation, cliché, and popular culture, and hint at a collective visual iconography. Breuning’s unique mode of pastiche is eclectic by design, drawing icons from sources both high and low, Edvard Munch to Andy Warhol’s Marilyns to the Easter Bunny.

Olaf Breuning was born in 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and lives and works in New York. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the NRW-Forum Düsseldorf in 2016. Additionally, he has had one-person exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway; and the Paul Klee Museum, Bern.

I don’t give answers, I give a platform for people to think.

Olaf Breuning

Public exhibitions of his work include the Public Art Fund commission "Clouds," Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, as well as the Public Art Fund exhibition "Lightness of Being,” City Hall Park, New York. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pompidou Center, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zurich; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Jeu de Paume, Paris; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.