Jef Bourgeau

Since he began exhibiting in the early 1990s, American artist Jef Bourgeau has inspired controversy. His practice, which is considered by some to be a provocation against the art world itself, essentially involves the remaking of art and artists, both imagined and real. Bourgeau has been a vexing figure for many and his "interventions" have continued to be viewed as a subversion of traditional notions of artistic practice and integrity.

Bourgeau’s art exemplifies the post-modern sense of working in a period when the epoch-making achievements of modern art are already matters of recorded fact. To this end, Bourgeau seems engaged with the vicissitudes of the constructed image, that is, the image’s transposition from one medium and context to another and the traces and consequences of this transfer. For Bourgeau, technology acts as a filter to dissect and rebuild random or banal images culled not only from the art world, but from such diverse sources as mass market catalogues, advertisements, cinema, and the Internet. By isolating and emptying out these disposable, commonplace representations, Bourgeau reinscribes them with a new essence, and in effect, completes them by converting such images into a charged narrative. As such, the mimicking of a second or third-generation "original" is tantamount to a kind of newfound legibility, resonance, and meaning. Art is used as a mediation filter, as a proposition about the act of perception itself.