Opening Reception

Friday, 27.6.25, 6 pm

Tichyocean is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Stefan Burger (*1977) in Zurich. The body of work titled “The Gold Collection” was developed for the exhibition and will be shown for the first time.

The exhibition title, “The Gold Collection,” references an aesthetic phenomenon of our time. In the Trump era, spray-painted and faux-gold ornamentation (known as Car Dealership Rococo) is experiencing a renaissance. Appearance is all that matters, and fake news is the new reality. What is real, and what kinds of visual realities are we dealing with? These questions, which have gained new urgency today, have long occupied Stefan Burger—and play a central role in his new photographic still lifes featured in the exhibition.

Still life has existed as a genre in art since antiquity. One of the most famous anecdotes is the legendary painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, as recounted by Pliny. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so lifelike that birds tried to peck at them. Even then, the focus was on image and reality. Birds and foodstuffs also appear in Stefan Burger’s photographic still lifes—but in his works, the props form strangely dislocated arrangements. Roughly textured surfaces and jittery patterns run through these recalcitrant images, reflecting, in an indeterminate way, the light of AI-generated pictures—light that comes from nowhere. The black-and-white color palette evokes Tichý’s visual world, while the classic silver gelatin print technique ties the works to the history of photography, locating them in an undefined time. This engagement with the photographic medium—its history and its reception—is fundamental to Burger’s practice. In the work “Hauchkreis”, Burger hides a reference to Walter Benjamin’s “A Short History of Photography,” in which the author writes: “(…) It is this halo, sometimes beautifully and meaningfully outlined by the now old-fashioned oval shape of the image frame (…)” With the still life, the artist also takes up a genre closely associated with the aspect of transience in photography. Still lifes preserve something destined to wither or disappear over time. The same happens when the shutter is pressed: the moment is frozen and preserved—but also stripped of life. The French term “nature morte” (dead nature) captures this paradox poignantly.

Beyond these historical references, Stefan Burger also incorporates allusions to contemporary themes, as in the work “Vereinzelung” (Isolation). A display window-like setup is divided by a perforated acrylic pane, reminiscent of the transparent partitions that became ubiquitous during the pandemic. The “isolation” of a single sock that has lost its pair in the wash, and a few lonely children’s gloves, point to a broader trend of bodily disintegration in the digital age.

Stefan Burger works analog. A defining feature of this technique is grain. This grain—not only as a photographic element—is embedded in various textures of the props used, but also bursts forth as colorful dots across the enamel frames surrounding the photos. The leap into sculpture continues in specially created glass objects produced for the exhibition. These were made in Nový Bor, Czech Republic, a place with a long tradition of Bohemian glassmaking. Glass is a fundamental element of photography—the lens through which light enters and the image is created is made of glass. Yet in Burger’s new sculptures, only faint traces of this original function remain. The objects free themselves from functional constraints and transform into quirky, displaced creatures or eccentric characters that appropriate the exhibition space in unconventional ways.

Finally, in the work “Natural Sleep” (2022), shown in the small rear room, the theme is resistance within sleep. The video is based on research into the psychotropic drugs Dormicum, Lexotanil, and Valium, which Stefan Burger conducted in the historical archives of the pharmaceutical company F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG in Basel. The work links the Tichyocean exhibition space with the activities of Psychcentral, a psychiatric-psychotherapeutic outpatient clinic located in the same building. It points to the normative ambiguities between health and mental illness, exclusion and inclusion, as well as productivity and dysfunction.

Mirjam Varadinis