Tina Braegger

Tina Braegger (b. 1985, Lucerne) lives and works in Berlin and Zurich. She is a conceptual artist whose work addresses questions related to originality, reproduction, authenticity, repetition, and difference. Since 2017, 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’s attraction to the bear has little to do with the band‘s music. Instead, her painting practice conceptually engages with how this counterfeit symbol inverts notions of official and unofficial, original and copy. In Braegger’s paintings, as in the concert parking lots that spawned countless variations of this figure, the bear operates according to the logic of the bootleg. The dancing bear absorbs, sponge-like, characteristics that it encounters through the process of its circulation, canonization, and its own fluctuating values—which Braegger addresses in her endless painterly permutations of this figure. As critic Francesco Tenaglia notes, „It is always there, in one form or another, and it defines the way painting reinvents it, reacts against it, ignores it, or digests it. It is a logo, a mannerism, a trigger, and a grid.“ ...

Société is a Berlin-based gallery with an international profile—its core operations lay in Europe, the United States, and Asia. The gallery’s exhibitions, publications, and boundary-pushing initiatives have established a vital dialogue among artists working internationally. Société focuses on establishing long-term, symbiotic relationships with its gallery artists, many of whom had their first solo exhibition with the gallery. The structure of the gallery’s program and the format of its projects is an artist-led approach that responds to the ever-evolving conditions of artistic research and production—at times even pushing beyond traditional exhibition formats. Although differing in media and approach, Société’s artists address the relationship between cultural production and consumption, the circulation of information, identity, and cultural history in an era highly mediated by technology. The gallery's publishing initiative Edition Société, has worked with accomplished graphic designers on a number of acclaimed artist's books. The gallery has additionally produced 12" records with several contemporary musicians. Société has exhibited at Art Basel / Art Basel Miami Beach / Art Basel Hong Kong / Frieze London / Frieze New York / Frieze LA / ARCO Madrid / Independent New York / Independent Brussels / Art Cologne / Art Brussels / Enter Art Fair / Gallery Weekend Berlin / and Art Berlin among other locations. ...