Galeria Nuno Centeno is pleased to present Stefan Brüggemann’s exhibition HYPER-POEM. This is the artist’s third exhibition in Portugal and second at Galeria Nuno Centeno.
Spanning – and sometimes combining – sculpture, video, painting, and drawing, Stefan Brüggemann’s work deploys text in conceptual installations rich with acerbic social critique and a post pop aesthetic. Born in Mexico City and working between Mexico and London, the artist’s oeuvre is characterized by an ironic conflation of Conceptualism and Minimalism. In this way, Brüggemann’s practice sits outside the canon of the conceptual artists practicing in the 1960s and 1970s, who sought dematerialisation and rejected the commercialisation of art. Instead his aesthetic is refined and luxurious, whilst maintaining a punk attitude.
For this exhibition Brüggemann describes his epigrammatic HYPER-POEMS as “slogans” written as part of the greater body of his text pieces. These laconic texts use the kind of language we most often encounter in our digital lives. Such set phrases have a semiotic character, like hazard symbols, that evokes learned responses. The presentation of this language as a kind of foreshortened modern poetics offers a caustic perspective on that modernity, while the staccato rhythms of these sloganistic lines of poetry perform the relentlessness of newsfeed culture.
Each fragment of HYPER-POEMS is presented as a number of unique A4 prints which are glued to a black fabric in an aleatory composition. Bruggemann’s process involves using a roller to glue the sheets, as is used to glue posters to hoardings. Engaging in this method ties the work to the visual language of billboard advertisement; a space of relentless noise and overlap, the analogue message board is a fitting presentation for these compositions.

Stefan Brüggemann (born in Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) Lives and works in Mexico City and London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include Extra! Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies (Guernica), at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2019); HYPER-PALIMPSEST, at Hauser & Wirth, London, UK (2019); Take and Abandon, at Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Switzerland (2017), among many others.