By GINNY VAN ALYEA

The Society for Contemporary Art announced two recent acquisitions for the Art Institute of Chicago. The SCA's annual meeting and dinner took place on the evening of June 18 in the museum's Griffin Court. Guests were able to view 6 selections for consideration – three works each from two artists – before gathering for dinner and hearing from AIC curators about the artists and the individual works. SCA members in attendance that evening voted to acquire one work by each artist. The two acquisitions are Farbengeographie [Color Geography] Nr. 4 (1972) by K.P. Brehmer and the second is Returning with Something (2022) by Sung Tieu. 

Brehmer was born and died in Germany and is considered still an under recognized artist. Tieu was born in 1987 in Vietnam but has spent most of her life in Germany.

Born in Berlin, Klaus Peter Brehmer trained as a reproduction technologist and, in the early 1960s, studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Around this time, he adopted the initials “KP,” both a nod to the then-banned West German Communist Party (KPD) and a playful attempt to complicate an ideological subject position. Rather than becoming a party member, he saw being an artist as a way to be “useful to society.” Brehmer is most frequently discussed alongside his contemporaries Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Konrad Leug, and Wolf Vostell, who were grouped under the banner of Capitalist Realism, a German tendency that sat between Western Pop Art on the one hand and Eastern Socialist Realism on the other. 

Appropriation remained a central motif in Brehmer’s practice. His work hinged on the subversion of capitalist visual representation approached through politics, economics, science, consumer culture, and everyday life. Diverse in media, technique, and edition, his works share a profoundly democratic concern with the capacity for a viewer’s emancipation through “visual agitation.” Amidst the Cold War’s binary conception of the world, this “sharpening of the senses,” as Brehmer called it, aimed at enabling the viewer to see through ideological constructs and established narratives to unfold competing interpretations. Brehmer died in Hamburg, Germany in 1997.

Working across media, Sung Tieu’s exhibitions meld sculpture, drawing, text, sound and video to investigate the evolving structures and mechanisms of control. Her practice raises questions around equality, belonging and individual sovereignty – often revealing the psychological effects of ideological systems and the politics they engender. Extensive research is set in contrast with an autobiographical query which allows Tieu to simultaneously address the deeply personal as well as the institutionalized structures that frame individual expression and agency. She has examined how social or political control can be imposed through design – be it of office furniture, household goods or bureaucratic paperwork. Mimicking and exploring the present legacy of Modernism – both art historically and more broadly – Tieu reveals it as an organizing force that processes and filters information, often favoring sameness over difference and order over invention.

For more information about SCA and to view past acquisitions click here