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Jef Bourgeau is one of the great minds in today’s art. He is the ultimate fabulist, challenging all our assumptions about art.

From the start, Bourgeau has worked within a practice we now identify as Post-Art: appropriation, deconstruction, relinquishment of authorial control, subverting traditional art exhibition and distribution practices, and other such strategies. A key element of this practice is that most of what we now experience is highly sophisticated simulation.

There is not one Jef Bourgeau but many. Not only has he adopted several modernist and more recent idioms in quick succession, but he has also invented several contradictory personae. Bourgeau has presented himself as artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, pragmatist and dreamer, bully and recluse.

Throughout his career Bourgeau has fashioned his own identity as one might manipulate an artistic medium, drawing on a fundamental model from his own generation, not so much preoccupied with the issue of identity as suspending it. Bourgeau exemplifies post-20th century theories of the self in which identity derives from an innate multiplicity that presents itself to the world in a shifting set of roles and exigencies.

His work is an on-going narrative yet without a story. Or, at the least, without resolution. There is a tension in his work that is relentless; like all great art, never entirely allowing the viewer the comfort of completing the imagery.

Bourgeau’s work has an allusive Duchampian wit, a Magrittian mystery, and a diabolic Swiftian mastery. Since narrative plays as a primary means of organizing people's lives and experiences, Bourgeau has created a long string of art narratives that some critics have described as superfictions. Other critics have suggested that his work is so far beyond what can properly be considered art, that they use the term “post-art” to describe it. Yet within all these definitions Bourgeau has set up a powerful negative logic, aimed to question the nature of art and art institutions. And, most profoundly, the culture that builds and decides such things.

- Jan van der Marck, THE ART OF JEF BOURGEAU

Lock Out @ Detroit Institute

1999
mixed

A Day in the Life

1992
lego house, video

The Wrong Show

1997
mixed

Nigger Toe

1997

Raid (Police Chief Thompson)

2000
torn art magazines

American Beauty

1994
mixed

Hatrack & Origin of the World

1991
multi-media

Bride Stripped...

2002
photograph