Only One of Us Is Real

Weiss Falk is please to present Only One of Us Is Real, Tina Braegger‘s fourth exhibition at the gallery. The bear motif is far from exhausted. In Only One of Us Is Real, the marching mascot provides a canvas for painterly experimentation and considerations that go beyond the brushstroke. In the process, the contours are gradually blurring. A black bear disappears into a background of the same color, other bears consist of raw canvas, one is filled like wallpaper, another expands and dissolves into the background. Few gestures are enough to recognize the animal. This is inherent in the figurehead of the Grateful Dead. Increasingly, the surroundings are coming into focus. Thus, in some paintings, the bears are spatially located and move within familiar paintings, or stage themselves as painters. Reproduction, recycling, alienation, appropriation, and exploitation—motifs that determine Tina Braegger's practice—manifest themselves pictorially in the exhibition's initial work. In front of a series of self-portraits, the bear, its mouth filled with brushes, looks back at us. It faces not only the viewer but also itself. As a muse or perhaps as an enemy? The title of the exhibition assumes a counterpart, which could also refer to the audience. We stand before them, the bears, yet an exchange of glances is largely denied to us. They squint their eyes, they have no eyes, their head is covered, the head is gone, replaced by a rejecting hand. Is there a togetherness here? Titles such as The Caro Kann Defense or Giuoco Piano, names of well-known chess openings, rather suggest a strategic antagonism. Between bears and viewers? Or perhaps artist and audience? Victory and defeat, good and evil, heaven on earth, raising hell, forms of communication, and oral aggression resonate here. The bear as a striking image, a stencil, a motif of belonging, is reinterpreted anew, but here too it serves to be understood with a message. —Maya Oehlen Tina Braegger is a conceptual artist whose work addresses questions related to originality, reproduction, authenticity, repetition, and difference. Since 2011, she has explored these topics through the motif of the „dancing bear,” a bootleg drawing that became an emblem of the American rock band The Grateful Dead in the 1970s. Braegger’s attraction to the bear has little to do with the band‘s music. Instead, her painting practice conceptually engages with how this counterfeit symbol inverts notions of official and unofficial, original and copy. In Braegger’s paintings, as in the concert parking lots that spawned countless variations of this figure, the bear operates according to the logic of the bootleg. The dancing bear absorbs, sponge-like, characteristics that it encounters through the process of its circulation, canonization, and its own fluctuating values—which Braegger addresses in her endless painterly permutations of this figure. As critic Francesco Tenaglia notes, „It is always there, in one form or another, and it defines the way painting reinvents it, reacts against it, ignores it, or digests it. It is a logo, a mannerism, a trigger, and a grid.Previously she has been subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world. Recent exhibitions include Curiosity Killed the Cat, a two-person exhibition with Sturtevant curated by Udo Kittelmann at De 11 Lijnen in Belgium and a solo exhibition at Neuer Essener Kunstverein. Her works have additionally been exhibited at New Acquisition II, Hildebrand Collection G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig; Kunsthalle Bern; Luma Westbau, Zurich; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen; Fondation Ricard, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; and DAAD Galerie, Berlin; among other venues.

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Rebgasse 27

Basel, NY