Commingling reality and illusion, authenticity and artifice, barbarism and civility, Olaf Breuning creates photographs, films, sculptures, and installations that draw heavily from popular culture and a collective visual iconography. He combines these contemporary aesthetics with more primal, shared drives: violence, sexuality, ritual, and companionship. The divergent impulses collide, often with absurd and hilarious results, as Breuning exploits the thin line between humor and pain.

Olaf Breuning was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York, USA. Breuning studied professional photography in Zurich, Switzerland and went on to complete postgraduate studies in photography at the HSFG Zurich. Breuning has received multiple awards and grants, including the Manor-Kunstpreis, Schaffhausen in 2000; and the Kiefer-Hablitzel Stipendum in 2000 and 1999 and the Moet-Chandon Stipendium and the Altelierstipendium New York, Stadt Zurich in 1999.  
             
Breuning has had solo exhibitions in Metro Pictures, New York; Conduits Gallery, Milan, Italy; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Australia; Galerie Air de Paris, France; Swiss Institute, New York; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and Centre D’art Contemporain, Geneva.

He also been included in several international group exhibitions, including Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Looking At Music at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Elsewhere at the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida (2007); Destroy Athens at 1st Athens Biennial, Greece (2007); All About Laughter at Mori Art Museum, Japan (2007); Skin Tight: the Sensibility of the Flesh, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2004); Let’s Entertain at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Kunstmuseum Wolfsberg, Germany and Miami Art Museum, Florida (2000).

His work has been reviewed in several international publications, including The New York Times, Tokion, Frieze, Modern Painters, Kunst Bulletin, Flash Art International, The Village Voice, Beaux-Artes Magazine, L’art Meme, and Artforum. His work has also been the subject of several monographs such as Olaf Breuning Queen Mary, published in 2006 by JRPIRinger Kunstverlag AG, Zurich and Olaf Breuning UGLY, published in 2001 by Hatje Cantz with essays by Christopher Doswald, Gianni Jetzer, Markus Stegmann, Dorthea Strauss and Phillipe Vergne.