It’s a common joke amongst art world professionals. If you encounter an object in the streets and you can’t figure out what it is or what it’s used for, it’s probably contemporary art. On the one hand, this is an in-crowd dig at the type of art thrown to-gether from left-overs found in dusty studio corners or actual garbage that make it into newspaper columns when the clean-ing crew at an art fair mistakes them for what they were and disposes ofthem with the rest of the rubbish. On the other hand, it recognizes the evocative potential of everyday, and often anonymous objects, the stuff that is sloppily strewn around in the public spaces we navigate. Few have an eye for these objects as keen as Bram Braam. The city is this Berlin-based sculptor and former graffiti artist’s natural habitat. It’s his source of inspiration and generous supplier of resources. He roams the streets daily, constantly taking in the surroundings that inform and shape his practice. It’s not people he’s interested in, but the stuff they’ve designed, planned, bought, built, cherished, neglected, trashed and discarded. Braam is fascinated by thematerial legacy of urban human life, the traces of activities and decisions that have the potential to become something quite different when left be-hind.(…)

Braam partly operates as an explorer, discovering unexpected poetry in a combination of shapes and materials, the aesthetic of the often overlooked mundane. He finds and photographs corroded quays, abandoned construction sites, vandalized sculptures and clumsily installed signage. But his practice is not only about attention for this type of detail and bringing it to light. It’s also about adding to this perspective. Braam is a miner, not just an explorer and he wrenches his finds from the pavements or empty lots and carries them to his studio where they serve as raw material for his art.

By combining, rearranging, stacking, amputating and shuffling the booty of his street combing trips, Braam creates sculp-tures that may look like something off the streets but simultaneously feel elevated from that context. The works ooze an acci-dental attractiveness that feels familiar, but is in fact the result of meticulously executed compositions. (…) His artcan simul-taneously be many different things as well as none at all. It exists in between the functional and the useless, fact and fiction, the identifiableand the unrecognizable, nature and culture, destruction and creation. Althoughit’s from the streets, it’s defi-nitely not street art, but rather sculpture in a contemporary guise.

–– Excerpt from Looks like an explorer, works like a minerby Edo Dijksterhuis

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