GATHERING Roonstraße 108 Cologne
Gathering is thrilled to present Stefan Brüggemann’s second exhibition with the gallery, SPEED, opening 5 September at Gathering Cologne.
Over the last two decades Brüggemann has pursued a singular and uncompromising dialogue between art and language lacing a historically informed and conceptual practice with humour.
It is never about words as stable meaning; it is about their capacity to fracture, to layer what is shown. It certainly situates Brüggemann within a constellation that extends from Cubist collage to conceptual text art, from Magritte to Holzer, from graffiti to the endlessly scrolling news ticker. But unlike so many artists who have claimed a single style of lettering or a signature phrase, Brüggemann constantly shifts formats like spray paint, gold leaf, marble, neon or wallpaper. Language here is not fixed, it is merely provisional. Upon entering, we hear a voice: “the event of writing can be the unevent of reading.” Both, a modest sentence and a radical proposition, we agree. And so with that, what appears as clarity becomes suspension.
At the centre is a cross-shaped structure in white marble. Its form recalls both the floor plans of churches and the strict geometries of modernist design. Cut across its surface is a line of red spray paint with the words “CRUCIFIED SCREENSHOT.” The inscription brings two registers into collision: the symbolism of the cross and the disposable language of the digital age. Marble grounds it in permanence, spray paint marks it with unrest. And so in this red-lit room, the object expands into its surroundings; it is not only looked at, but entered.
Brüggemann’s work does not resolve language nor what we say through it, it destabilises it. He reveals how words colour space, how space refracts words back to us. The writing, here, is no longer “on the wall”, it is in the wall, in the air, in us. What remains is not certainty but possibility, for the recognition that words here act less as messages than as materials, letting us fold back into the physical world.
Text by Udo Kittelmann
Photography by Roman Häbler and Lars-Ole Bastar
