In their practice, the Swiss artist duo Bastien Aubry (b. 1974, lives in Zürich) and Dimitri Broquard (b. 1969, lives in Brussels) skillfully test the boundaries between art, design and popular culture. The duo flirts with traditional craft, do-it-yourself, the flawed and the deficient as well as the fake as a reaction to the perfection and stylistic confidence of modern design and art. Drawing, collage, Photoshop painting, papier mâché and particularly ceramics are their preferred media. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude, Bastien Aubry and Dimitri Broquard roam through the realm of modern and postmodern art, pick up motifs and references and give them a grotesque and trivial twist. Everyday objects provide them with starting-points for adaptations and abstractions. The exhibition title Sunny Side Down refers ironically to the what happens behind the scenes.
Radical juxtapositions are produced not only in the exhibition space but also in the collages: different materials rub up against one another, the traditional collides with the contemporary, the attributions of inside and outside, the real and the simulated slip away.
Plain chipboard panels suddenly change from picture support to autonomous paintings. The ceramic objects that the artists have produced along with the ceramicist Eric Rihs from the Jura are mounted in a loose abstract arrangement on the laminated panels. In the main exhibition space, three sculptures, stand at an angle to one another, made with store bought doors connected with willfully manipulated iron rods to produce an abstract and also rather clumsy spatial setting. Here a deviation from the standard form, the poetry of chance and failure are the intention and deliberate irony to the standardization and perfection of modern design. The charm of their work lies in their caricature of both good and bad taste and playing with the everyday. Aubry/Broquard yield nonchalantly and smartly to the fascination of consumer culture.
Aubry/Broquard have had numerous exhibitions, notably The Swiss Institute, New York, 2012, Helmhaus, Zurich, Switzerland, 2013, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, 2014 and MABA, Nogent-Sur-Marne, France 2015.