BRUNO PEINADO / WHY STYLE November 21 2005 – January 7 2006

The Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by French Artist Bruno Peinado: WHY STYLE. As a rising star in the international art world who has most recently shown at the Lyon Biennial 2005 and who is still enjoying the huge success of his 2004 solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Bruno will now make his mark on New York with his first major institutional solo show in the United States. As an artist who excels in creating without boundaries, his installation will completely transform the SI.

The title of the exhibition is a reference to the classic hip-hop film, ‘Wild Style’ (1982) by Charlie Ahearn, which captured the birth of the South Bronx hip hop scene. A portrait of a generation of DJs, rappers and graffiti artists, ‘Wild Style’ shows the development of its protagonists trying to create work while making compromises between the integrity of their art and its swift appropriation and co-opting by the media.

For this exhibition, ‘Wild Style’ is transformed to WHY STYLE: a turn of phrase that reflects Peinado balance struck between media and fashion’s methods of appropriation and making a slick reversal of such gestures. Riffs of bootleg culture — creating an overload of references and processes — WHY STYLE stages a visual assault of references at once slipping into obscurity and at the same time carbon copied and inverted: the 6 becomes 9, popular logos caught in native American Dream Catchers to 19th century shadow profiles, white jazz musicians in black-face performance, blacked-out American Flags, Malcolm Mclaren’s elevation of trash-punk with the New York Dolls. The borrowing and quotations create a proliferation of signs caught in a loop somewhere between the iconic black cube monoliths of minimalism and South Bronx Graffiti.

Also on view: Lo-Revolution / Bruno Peinado at Parker’s Box / Nov 18 – Dec 24, 2005
193 Grand Street / Williamsburg Bklyn 11211 / Fri-Mon 1–7pm / www.parkersbox.com