Tina Braegger: It’s Not Looking Good for You
Duarte Sequeira and Société are pleased to announce It’s Not Looking Good for You, a solo exhibition by the Swiss artist and writer Tina Braegger.
Tina Braegger’s work addresses questions related to originality, reproduction, authenticity, repetition, and difference. Since 2016, she has explored these topics through the motif of the “dancing bear,” a bootleg drawing that became an emblem of the American rock band The Grateful Dead in the 1970s. Braegger first started working with the bear after seeing it on a concert handbill and the image subsequently evolved into a reference system that has since permeated every aspect of her artistic practice. Braegger employs the bear as a “structuring logic to follow the same set of rules over and over again,” using it as an anchor in her painterly exploration of a diverse catalogue of styles. By taking the bear out of its psychedelic context, she directs our attention to the motif itself and its visual and conceptual malleability. As a sign or symbol, the bear can be manipulated to mean anything—even to stand in for the creative process itself.
Recently, Braegger’s shifting relationship with this motif has taken on a more narrative approach. While many of her earlier compositions depicted the bear in a distorted, fragmented, or tessellated form, this new body of intimately-scaled work radically pares down her approach to the symbol. It’s Not Looking Good for You, Braegger’s first exhibition in Korea, riffs on the structure of chess. Braegger has created sixteen paintings—referring to the number of pawns in the game—each loosely conceived as variations on the lowly piece that crosses the board with the hope of becoming a queen or a rook. The most common, expendable figure on the board, the pawn is an apt counterpart to Braegger’s bear: both are prone to manipulation and control, reflecting the artist’s ongoing exploration of agency, repetition, and transformation.
Unlike the countless deadheads who constantly revamped the bootleg icon in their own unofficial merch sold in concert parking lots, Tina Braegger’s adoption of the motif is not an act of devotion or fandom. Instead, for Braegger, the mascot operates as a surrogate, a sparring partner. Her engagement with the dancing bear is a game in its own right. And the chess game that It’s Not Looking Good for You never directly depicts, yet insouciantly alludes to, is ultimately a match between painting and the artist herself. As Braegger writes in her poem “Rooks on the Seventh,” one of 16 poems that accompany the paintings in the exhibition: You loved me as a loser, now you’re worried I might win.
