BRAM BRAAM

BRAM BRAAM

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BRAM BRAAM

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Written by
Edo Dijksterhuis (art critic)
Year
2023

Monograph How to fix a broken line

Looks like an explorer, works like a miner 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 together from left-overs found in dusty studio corners or actual garbage that make it into newspaper columns when the cleaning crew at an art fair mistakes them for what they were and disposes of them 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 the material legacy of urban human life, the traces of activities and decisions that have the potential to become something quite different when left behind. 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 sculptures that may look like something off the streets but simultaneously feel elevated from that context. The works ooze an accidental attractiveness that feels familiar, but is in fact the result of meticulously executed compositions. The aptly titled Does Coincidence Really Exist (2017) illustrates this nicely. At first glance it looks like a discarded piece of plastic piping curled up like a snake or, for those periodically inclined, an industrial version of a reclining nude. On closer inspection, however, it turns out to be cast, a lot heavier than the original piping and quite useless for laying cables. While Braam uses objets trouvés, his works are not readymades. He processes and alters the material to such an extent that it can’t – like a readymade – be returned to its original context and seamlessly resume its function. There’s a leftover aura of functionality nevertheless. The metal grate and handrails in Function Follows Form (2018) bring to mind air conditioning and stairs leading to an underground station, but grafted onto a cement column their ergonomic or infrastructural qualities dissolve. They become signifiers without referents, introducing a new way of relating to them. The user becomes a viewer and his body, which used to interact with these objects as lowly aids, now circles and scans them as volumes on par with itself. The loss of function or functional transformation is often the result of combining different, often disparate elements. Braam doesn’t go as far as the surrealist ‘chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ but he does have a penchant for reversals, categorical switches and the cold fusion of unlikely partners. In Simulacrum (2019) what looks like a pedestal is elevated to the level of a statue while sinking into a base that half-heartedly plays its part, absorbing a bright orange dustbin and sporting a handrail on top. It triggers a mild but persistent form of cognitive confusion. What should be at the bottom is in the middle, constituting the body of the work, so to say. And the parts promising meaning and functionality have been reduced to the role of armour and halo. Braam doesn’t aim for complete alienation, however. He never fully severs the connection with urban reality. In this respect his work calls to mind the artistic preferences of Jan van Schoonhoven, who was fond of making rubbings of manhole covers and incorporated the shape of church columns and beams into his pristinely white wall reliefs. Or Piet Mondrian’s famous last work Victory Boogie Woogie, in which the dynamics of New York life are embodied by swinging patches of paint echoed by the patterned steel grid of Braam’s Berlin Boogie Woogie (2022).
Braam is interested in the cityscape’s seemingly organic development: the way things appear, dilapidate and disappear. Like the mopeds that are used for Modern Mutants (2022): once someone’s proud possession, now fallen into neglect and crushed by the unrelenting forces of time and progress. The Flow of History (2018) takes things one step further. This excision of a wall with cracks, discolouration, abraded areas and traces of oxidation is nothing less than a giant logbook of communal acts. Youths have leaned against it, dogs marked their territories on it, posters were stuck to its surface and nails were driven into its core. Passers-by have touched it, leaving the sweat of their palms and injecting the wall with molecular traces of their presence. Lifting this piece of material history from its natural surroundings, Braam does something similar to what Nouveaux Realists such as Jacques Villegié did in the 1950s. Villegié collected torn posters from the streets of Paris, highlighting the poetry of interacting layers in an art form he called décollage or lacéré anonyme. The Frenchman considered these works the result of the crowd’s anarchy and saw himself as a curator rather than an artist. In this case, the same could be said of Braam. Rather than creating the image, he found and framed it. It’s the work of an explorer. But as always with him, this did not suffice for long. Like Gordon Matta-Clark, who attacked buildings with a chainsaw and blowtorch to make ‘anarchitecture’, Braam started cutting up walls and other architectural elements to rearrange their remains as wall reliefs, large and small. The act of destruction is followed by reconstruction, like the endless cycle of life, but by putting his creations behind plexiglass the artist halts progress and freezes time. Few works better illustrate this than Tesserae (2018), with its horizontal layers of walls that look like a core sample from an archaeological site. While works like The Flow of History and Tesserae depend on more or less lucky finds at the frayed edges of the metropolis’ hubbub, Braam started creating his own raw materials stuck as he was in his studio during the Covid lockdowns. Spray-painting then filling mallets with cement imitated the wear and tear of time. The unpredictable way paint adheres to and interacts with the cement added an element of randomness and a touch of authenticity. This newly developed technique created a form of ‘instant history’. The Flow of Present (2020) insinuates stories from a past but goes beyond the particular expression of Berlin, evoking a more global and universal experience of urbanity. The Flow of Present not only reaches across time, but also transcends media, as do many of Braam’s works. He playfully combines painting with sculpture and gladly adds to the categorical confusion by throwing some stickers into the mix. When looking at And it Sounds a Little Bit Like This (2022) one could wonder: is it a three-dimensional painting, a sculpture acting like a canvas or an artefact with mysterious applications? This hybrid nature is also present in As if (2017), a collection of rocks which were halved and reconstructed using a 3D-printed polymer. The bright orange addition, in a way reminiscent of the dustbin in Simulacrum, poses as a man-made improvement on nature. It’s more attractive and less susceptible to erosion, but its hyper-realism also feels awkward and even a bit creepy. At an underlying, more reflective level, this holds true for almost Braam’s entire body of work. The raw materials the artist uses to compose his works are mostly the artificial products of a political-economic system that has increasingly proven itself unsustainable and is driving us off the cliff of existence. However, particularly in cities, the epitome of the cultural realm where we’re surrounded by our own industrial output, we tend to forget or downplay the role of nature, even though we’re part of it and can’t live without it. Braam touches on the dilemmas and pitfalls of urban existence without being blatantly obvious about ecological welfare or our impending, mass consumption-driven, doom. His series Outgrowth combines a tree trunk and elements of architectural hardware. The living organism may look like it’s hemmed in and literally cornered where it’s destined to wither away and die. But opposite to this this reading of the work as the brutal domination of culture over nature, one could also envision the tree growing out of and on top of the rubble of our civilization. This sense of ambiguity lies at the heart of Braam’s work. His art can simultaneously be many different things as well as none at all. It exists in between the functional and the useless, fact and fiction, the identifiable and the unrecognizable, nature and culture, destruction and creation. Although it’s from the streets, it’s definitely not street art, but rather sculpture in a contemporary guise. The classic interaction between volume and space becomes a play with volumes reflecting on public space and our position in it. and fiction, the identifiable and the unrecognizable, (UNRECOGNISABLE) nature and culture, destruction and creation. Although it’s from the streets, it’s definitely not street art, but rather (RATHER A) sculpture in a contemporary guise. The classic interaction between volume and space becomes a play with volumes reflecting on public space and our position in it.
Written by
Sarie Nijboer
Year
2021

Solo exhibition Words can't tell

A search for the raw traces to be found in our urban environment - a landscape dominated by architecture - are the points of departure for the work of Dutch artist Bram Braam. This search manifests itself in a sculptural and poetic representation of materiality and decay. Architectural landscapes are by their very nature subject to change, they are built for the purpose of humankind to live, work and play and, at the same time, it is this use that causes transformation alongside the influences of nature, destruction and decay. The sculptural works of Bram Braam are a reference to this eternal cycle and the transformation process of this materiality from its creation to its death. In his work, the artist plays with the tension that can be found in the blurring line between reality and abstraction, which unfolds in a balanced spectacle of our everyday built environment - from ruins to new modern architectural buildings. His wall reliefs and sculptures contain industrial materials such as concrete, bricks, wood, steel, plexiglass, glass, and spray paint, and show a confrontation of the different qualities of the materials. His influence as an artist is not to be ignored here, Bram Braam takes the materials for his works directly from streets he encounters and transforms them into minimalist compositions in which a contrast can be found between the coincidence and the control - sometimes including the real traces left by people, and sometimes with traces made by the artist himself.
Bram Braam has a strong interest and background in alternative ways of using and appropriating our public space - from counterculture, do-it-yourself movements to graffiti art. The mixing of low culture with high culture, outside and inside, rough and smooth, unauthorized taking the city itself as a background and transforming it, are recognizable working methods of the artist. It is therefore not surprising that Bram Braam has a strong interest in the wall as an artistic medium; he seeks the limits of what painting can be in the context of our built environment. This working method is clearly visible in all of his works, in which he is able to take everyday objects out of their context and give them a new form. Here he plays with the boundary between ready-made and perfectly constructed sculptures that are being presented as fused fragments and eventually transformed into a new reality. The artist draws inspiration from 20th century utopian thinking, modernism in architecture, brutalism and its failures - but also visible are references to minimalism, the De Stijl movement or artist Gordon Matta Clark. As an artist, Bram Braam plays with these references while simultaneously revealing his interest in the development of our urban environment in which different times collide. His work depicts the influences of the era of postmodernism, internet and globalization we live in. He reflects on these fragmented realities of our daily lives - the online world, our landscapes and architecture - which contain a constant mix of fake and real, adaptations and transformations, and where different authors and time periods intermingle. Bram Braam's work is about the way we look at this reality, what is staged, fake, constructed or natural, and when the self becomes a new entity. What his sculptural works reveal is an ongoing process of this evolution in which a mixture of copy, transformation, adaptation and decay come to the fore.
Written by
Domenico de Chirico
Year
2019

Solo Exhibition — Metro / Galerie Burster

Bram Braam’s work seems to overflow due to a remarkable tangible complexity in the material variety of his works and therefore in what precedes the creative act itself. The concept of Utopia turns out to be the fundamental interpretative key that allows one to gain a broader understanding of Braam’s work and somehow untangle the threads that make up the stratification of his works. The word Utopia etymologically derives from the ū = ‘non’ and tópos = ‘place’ and therefore has the the hidden meaning of non-place. This non-place is an impossible place, an imaginary architecture, a vision which points in the direction of a non-futuristic future.Braam deals with this concept in a circular way through a vortex of reinvented materials, found objects, assembled furniture, rags of city walls, and almost any element can be exemplary of a constructivist historicity understood not only in relation to building but also in semantic terms. Architecture, for Braam, can be found in the buildings of Le Corbusier, in abandoned buildings, and in the graphic signs left by a person passing by. It is the historicity of the environmental evolution that Braam prefers to focus upon.But in this vortex of signs that finds completeness in the creation of large sculptures, in which each constituent element is never randomly chosen, it is possible to highlight two trajectories that are indefinitely covered by the term mentioned above: Utopia. These are two lines that are not rectilinear, curved or curved again, and that deal with pairs such as new and old, real and false, natural and artificial, original and remodeled, construction and destruction. Through his works Bram Braam addresses Utopia both as an environmental utopia with a functionalist and constructivist mold that characterized 20th century modernism and as a non-place utopia. It is a fairly complicated dialectic in which what is identified as a possible place with its own recognizable identity becomes non-place as soon as the possibility of its being or of its lasting decay. At the same time we are witnessing the awareness of the non-place as the only place possible.
The coexistence of different architectural styles, of maps that correspond to several political periods, of signs that define the experience of an urban or civilized environment – is it even possible to find one that is completely virgin, without residues of humanity? Of elements that highlight the mixture of different styles, sanctioning them with the impossibility to find a beginning and declaring the absolute intertwining of one with the other, are at the base of this non-place place whose complex stratification is always re- proposed differently from the work of Braam.This stratification, this overlap that actually presents itself as a chronological plot, finds a powerful explanation in the artist’s wall works. It is about real walls, parts of cities where the calmness of becoming is tangible, the fascination of non-place as place, the absence of abuse and therefore the presence of a quietness made up of voices from the past and the present that have always and forever looked at a hypothetical future in a utopian way; coming to terms with a real utopia made of rubble and scratched walls.
Written by
Nadim Samman & Anja Henckel
Year
2016

Solo Exhibition — Modern Mutants / Galerie Burster

The formal reductions of Holland’s De Stijl would reverberate throughout the history of the twentieth century, crossing oceans to effect movements such as American Minimalism and international currents in architecture. For a Dutch artist concerned with the built environment, such as Braam, the modernist legacy looms large. In previous projects such as City of Tomorrow he worked through the tactile and volumetric poetry of failed urban planning experiments – the dead ends of utopian reduction, rather than so many promised clean slates. Through a series of compelling sculptures, installations and wall reliefs, his ouevre has spoken by splicing together ‘poor’ modern vernaculars to address the wrack of good architectural intentions on the shores of lived experience.With this new body of work Braam’s focus has shifted, from imperfect figures of total design to messy ground. From the skein of built control – the masterplan, with its centripital organization – to neglected fringes. Also, to centrifugal fallout: wastelands, junkspace and street furniture; milestones on the pathway between environmental rationalization and entropy. Specifically, Braam’s new works address Berlin – his home – as a mutable cityscape, hovering between the forms inherited from its exceptional history, its planned future development, and its remaining pockets of undefined character. In a work such as Coordinating traces Berlin, a photo-grid depicting sections of various walls encrusted with wear and grafitti, the artist foregrounds memories inscribed upon the built environment. Elsewhere, in a photo of a brownfield site occupied by an empty billboard, he seems concerned with the possibilities that may emerge from unclaimed spaces. What will be written next on the face of this city?Braam’s new artistic offerings are also hybrid objects. As If contains a found stone that has been sawn in two; one half replaced by a three-dimensional printed copy of itself. Such an object might be said to fulfil philosopher Noel Carroll’s definition of the monstrous. It is a ‘category violation’; a mutant plastic-mineral. But Braam’s agenda is not to cast perjorative stones. This item, like other recent works, is offered as a metonym for what he considers the ‘hyperreal’ condition of the contemporary metropole.[1] Indeed, his gestures respond to the loosening of reductive strictures ushered in by postmodernism, as well as the laissez-faire eclecticism of contemporary urban design where image and structure are fused – in billboards, facade as screen or photograph, cladding and more. Another part of this multi-object artwork consists of wall-mounted plexiglass panels, bearing printed images depicting parts of a sculpture. The source material – the sculpture – is located nearby, placed on the gallery floor. Through this choreography of elements, distributed across media, As If endeavours to pick apart the hybrid or hyperreal municipal condition – marshalling forms that flatten three-dimensional source material into two-dimensions, and which volumize image conditions.
The prevalence of plexiglass in the works is loaded. It is the ultimate ‘look but don’t touch’ material. One fingerprint, or the lightest overlay of dust, and its pristine surface is sullied. No amount of right angles is a bulwark against the profanation of a smudge. The nullility of Donald Judd’s minimalism – ventured as the cousin of transcendence – needs constant tending in order to be maintained. In Immateriality Within the Effects of Time Braam’s eye for the vernacular fate of modern(ist) materials is again put to work: Plexiglass as a protective layer, a tool for preservation out in the ‘real’ world beyond the white cube. The work consists of a rusting square metal plate, its paint flaking and corroded away in places, that has been wall-mounted. Recovered from a wastesite by the artist, part of it is overlaid with a plexi panel – a section of which bares a printed hue that refers to the original colour of the metal plate. Braam’s aesthetic gesture serves to highlight the now profaned design concept for the object, while supplying it with a defensive token. Like other works in this exhibition, here Braam stages the uneasy tension between a plan and its realization; between map and territory.Through his sculptural borrowing of heterogeneous materials and stylistic traces Braam presents the audience with compressions of architectural time – past, present and possibility, rubbing up against one another. His works press the question of where revaluation and reuse are most appropriate, and where damnatio memoriae (condemnation of memory) is perhaps better applied. The latter was a practice utilized by the ancient Egyptians and Romans to destroy any tangible link to the legacy of historical periods with problematic reputations. In the fields of architecture and design today, the future of communal life and collective memory rests in answers to this question.[1] The term hyperreal is a key concept outlined by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard.
Written by
Yasmijn Jarram
Year
2016

Solo Exhibition — Welcome to the real world / Galerie Frank Taal

Visual artist Bram Braam (NL, 1980) deals with architecture and the constant evolution of our daily surroundings. Apart from his photos, collages and assemblages Bram focusses on sculptural works of a subtle or –juxtaposing– monumental scale. Many influences can be found in these works: the American minimalism of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, the utopian thinking of architects as Le Corbusier, yet also the modernism of Bauhaus and De Stijl. In his work the schematic clarity of the Dutch landscape meets with the raw, urban chaos of Braam’s place of residence Berlin.Braam looks at public space through the eyes of a sculptor. He photographs the unsigned ‘non-spaces’ in the city, or especially the urban areas where the old and new meet. In Braam’s studio these concrete observations are transformed into abstract artworks; balancing between the formal and the narrative. The grey area between coincidence and control, between nature and culture continues to be questioned. When is something considered original and ‘real’ and when is it carefully constructed? Nowadays artificiality is omnipresent: from Photoshop to plastic surgery, from virtual reality to hologram. It comes to no surprise that Braam is fascinated by the concept of ‘hyperreality’ by philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007). With this term Baudrillard refers to an artificial, improved version of the everyday actuality where it is barely possible to distinguish between reality and illusion.
In his solo exhibition Welcome to the real world Braam aims to gather these different actualities. This is among others reflected in the distinctive mix of artificial and found materials. The exterior of the site-specific installation Black White consists of weathered black plates that are used in construction for the pouring of concrete – a phase between planning and execution. Meanwhile, the interior of the installation shows a structure of glossy glass plates and white surfaces. The various displayed stones are merely partially authentic: the fluorescent orange segments are plastic 3D prints. In the assemblage Horor Vacui Braam combines his unpolished construction plates with traces of vandalism, gentrification and decay, in combination with high gloss Plexiglas.The photo series Accidental Visions shows locations in Berlin where unintentionally artistic references to modernism have emerged: ragged layers of paint in just slightly deviating colours are applied on walls full of graffiti. Braam completes the composition with an added layer of tightly painted colour shapes. A comparable contrast underlies the installation The different possibilities of a truth, where a raw street object is placed alongside a stylized shape. In Braam’s public research into shape and material he does not only expose the artistic process but also the speed at which the public space of a metropolitan city such as Berlin is constantly transforming. Here, the heterogeneity of Braam’s place of residence finds its mirror image in the (literal) layering of his work.