The Till Richter Museum is thrilled to have Bram Braam(*1980, Sittard, Netherlands) as our sixth Rising Stars Residency Artist.

The art of Bram Braam is looking for a modern utopia. It is informed by actions and processes of man, following an evolution and tracing different directions. What are the traces of man’s doing in the worlds we create? Can there be a syntheses of urbanism and nature.

The question is, in general: What becomes and what remains?

Art (and architecture as it is involved here) has always played a crucial role in the development of humanity and in allowing us to undertake and archeological examination of our own traces. His art is an instrumant of interrogation, perhaps not as crass as the proverbial policelight, but it does not want to be particularly pretty or comfortable, either.

Nonetheless the works are beautiful to behold because while they appear often rough or even brute at first sight they are, at closer inspection, always finely tuned and highly polished in their formal conception.The contrast of man-made and natural materials or natural materials that have been transformed by man is fascinating in that it shows u show mand and object are connected, how ther interdepend.

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This brings us tot he materials and forms themselves. In how far is a wall of bricks art? Yes, the lessons of De Stijl and Duchamp tell us that anything can be art. If so, what is the difference between a Duchampian ready-made and the cast, i.e. reproduction in a different yet similar material, of a found object, especially if you were actually looking to find such an object? Is one art and the other not? Or is one more art than the other? The answer has to do with coincidence and awareness. Some things just happen, or not, and others arepart of a planned development. This development is likely intented to materialise and remain.

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This is where Braam’s work turns from concrete art into poetry because it indicates the ephemeral nature of human existence and intervention by showing us selected and arranged fragments of what becomes and what remains.

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