As you enter this exhibition, you’re immediately confronted by a television playing the news. So of course what you’ll see is entirely dependent on when you visit – and even if it’s intensely depressing, it’s still a wise move on the part of the gallery. The sound of the here-and-now follows you around the space, and keeps the work of KP Brehmer (1938-1997) rooted in the present – which is important, because even though he’s a twentieth-century artist, his work feels grimly, urgently relevant.
Everything on display looks like it’s rooted in stats and facts: you’ll find paintings, prints and sculptures that resemble charts, graphs, diagrams and symbols. Part of the cultural explosion in post-war Germany, Brehmer aimed to develop a kind of democratic, outward-looking art that reflected politics and society. So the telly is on display alongside a piece called ‘TV-Braunwerte’, a painting/blackboard that ranks the content of television shows in varying shades of brown depending on how fascistic it is.
Two other paintings track the growth of human skulls. Another takes thermographic readings. Two flags, one American, one French, have been tampered with to reflect changing national populations. This all probably sounds dry and tedious – but Brehmer was always a visual artist, offering us witty aesthetic metaphors rather than specifics. Most astonishing is that this was all decades before the weaponisation of data – before metrics, before infographics, before the world turned into a place where elections are swayed by algorithms and referendums by stats on the sides of buses. If only Brehmer had been born a generation later – we need his subversions more than ever.
@mattbreen3