A search for the raw traces to be found in our urban environment - a landscape dominated byarchitecture - are the points of departure for the work of Dutch artist BramBraam. This search manifests itself in a sculptural and poetic representationof materiality and decay. Architectural landscapes are by their very naturesubject to change, they are built for the purpose of humankind to live, workand play and, at the same time, it is this use that causes transformationalongside the influences of nature, destruction and decay. The sculptural worksof Bram Braam are a reference to this eternal cycle and the transformationprocess of this materiality from its creation to its death. 

In his work, theartist plays with the tension that can be found in the blurring line betweenreality and abstraction, which unfolds in a balanced spectacle of our everydaybuilt environment - from ruins to new modern architectural buildings. His wallreliefs and sculptures contain industrial materials such as concrete, bricks,wood, steel, plexiglass, glass, and spray paint, and show a confrontation ofthe different qualities of the materials. His influence as an artist is not tobe ignored here, Bram Braam takes the materials for his works directly from streetshe encounters and transforms them into minimalist compositions in which acontrast can be found between the coincidence and the control - sometimesincluding the real traces left by people, and sometimes with traces made by theartist himself. 

Bram Braam has astrong interest and background in alternative ways of using and appropriatingour public space - from counterculture, do-it-yourself movements to graffitiart. The mixing of low culture with high culture, outside and inside, rough andsmooth, unauthorized taking the city itself as a background and transformingit, are recognizable working methods of the artist. It is therefore notsurprising that Bram Braam has a strong interest in the wall as an artisticmedium; he seeks the limits of what painting can be in the context of our builtenvironment. This working method is clearly visible in all of his works, inwhich he is able to take everyday objects out of their context and give them anew form. Here he plays with the boundary between ready-made and perfectlyconstructed sculptures that are being presented as fused fragments andeventually transformed into a new reality.

The artist drawsinspiration from 20th century utopian thinking, modernism in architecture,brutalism and its failures - but also visible are references to minimalism, theDe Stijl movement or artist Gordon Matta Clark. As an artist, Bram Braam playswith these references while simultaneously revealing his interest in thedevelopment of our urban environment in which different times collide. His workdepicts the influences of the era of postmodernism, internet and globalizationwe live in. He reflects on these fragmented realities of our daily lives - theonline world, our landscapes and architecture - which contain a constant mix offake and real, adaptations and transformations, and where different authors andtime periods intermingle. Bram Braam's work is about the way we look at thisreality, what is staged, fake, constructed or natural, and when the selfbecomes a new entity. What his sculptural works reveal is an ongoing process ofthis evolution in which a mixture of copy, transformation, adaptation and decaycome to the fore.

Text Sarie Nijboer

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