BIO

Steve Braun, born in 1989 in Demmin, studied fine arts in the sculpture class of Ottmar Hörl from 2013 to 2017 and in the photography class of Jürgen Teller at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg from 2017 to 2019. In 2019 his professor Jürgen Teller awarded him the title of a master student. During his studies from 2017 - 2019 he participated in a long-term workshop of Frederik Bush.

ARCHETYPE

In his photographic and installation works, Steve Braun uses a pictorial symbolic language borrowed from ethnographic, ideological or religious contexts. Historically charged set pieces from cultural history become props for his dramatically staged still lifes. Detached from their usual sphere of activity, the entanglement of meaning and form manifested in the symbol shifts, creating a new attribution in the recurring pictorial element.
Steve Braun composes picture legends that go beyond the two-dimensional depiction to the objectivity of his motifs. He drapes, arranges, constructs and processes the objects, emphasizes their materiality and shows them as installations that take up the whole room. The distinction between sculptural examination and photographic strategy becomes blurred.

STRANGE MEMORY

We try to tame the error by technical control mechanisms. In this attempt at subjugation, which affects not only language but also images, the perfect image is an aggressive act of separation, between defined technically good and inferior material. But the separation does not start with the technical execution, but cuts the imagination right from the start. A technically inferior picture can create the space for coincidences, mistakes and other forms of aesthetics that do not suffer from the dogma of the standardized picture. In my work Strange Memories I investigate this process and comb through VHS material for images that are generated from errors. Through the superimposition of half images, combined with movement, image worlds are created that create new space for interpretation. The resulting images remind us of the past, as well as dreams, the naive, longing gaze that one likes to cast into the past. A memory, which becomes archetypal for a whole generation, because we all have saved these pictures in our heads.