Abel Burger I Appaloosa

The gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new work by Abel Burger (b. 1982, France). This will be the artist's first show with Brigade since joining the gallery's program in 2022 and the artist's first-ever solo exhibition in Scandinavia. Titled 'Appaloosa', the exhibition will feature works emerging from the artist's deep engagement with ancient civilisations, mythology and the traditions of storytelling. 

'Myths are public dreams and dreams are private myths' - Joseph Campbell. 

The question of the intimate is the central axis of French artist Abel Burger's first solo exhibition with Brigade. Prompted by eschatological dreams, of old civilizations returning at the end of the world, and conversing with spirits, Burger opens a parallel world, a world concerned with the poetry of sleep. For 'Appaloosa' - the title drawn from the breed of horse the artist rode as a child - Burger returns to mythology and the dream state as a way to delve into humanity's sense of belonging. 

Unpacking and amalgamating nostalgic memories and cultural traditions, Burger creates stories within stories where myths and personal narratives harbour the potential for sneaking in hidden messages. In delicate works on board and paper, Burger merges inspirations from characters and stories found in ancient Greek and Roman myths with more contemporary references from the artist's childhood, including vintage cartoons and videogames. The exhibited works build on Burger's longstanding experimentations with materiality through various media, textures, and pigments. Combining thick oil pastels with pencil, crayon and etchings in an intricate impasto-style, Burger transforms personal, queer narratives into hyper-detailed works that invite closer inspection. 

With Two Secrets Hidden Inside  (2022), Blue Lagoon (2022) and Bois Fossile (2022) Burger elaborates on the visual language of earlier architectural collages, which feature elegantly contoured panels and lines that diverge and intersect against monochromatic color fields. In these works, the artist constructs a personal system of logic, situating fragments of built and lived environments amid panels of rust and deep blue, rich in textural nuance. Burger pays loving attention to the smallest details of these imagined constructions; arches, roof-tiles, ornaments of serpents and hieroglyphs from the artist's personal system. In other collage works, such as Siwa (2022 - 2023), Burger's lines and figurations coalesce in a dynamic, symmetrical composition. The titular work Appaloosa (2023) is a study in balance, its composition nodding towards traces of memories, the poem below its central panel recounting November rains and the galloping of wild instincts, and in other works on wood, like Rampal Pacific (2022), figures, palms and amorphous beings emerge from a cloudy no-mans-land, speaking to a surrealist human experience. Nearly all the exhibited works feature handwritten titles, comments or lines of poetry, traces, and messages of intent from the artist, opening further prisms through which to observe them.  

Melding archetype and allegory to reinterpret, and sometimes subvert, shared mythologies, the dreamscapes in 'Appaloosa' refute utopia in favour of their own, unique, internal logic. In places narrative, in others purely tableau, they incorporate timely, contemporary detail, while nodding to an old, enduring fascination with myth and legend. Expanding beyond the historic, Burger's works seem to acknowledge the role that myths and ancient civilizations can play, both as cultural heritage and contemporary storytelling, as tools for opening alternative spaces and navigating reality today.