Jef Bourgeau: Abstract Geometric Art | Exclusive Limited Editions

Jef is an American photographer, painter and conceptual artist who has become notorious through his sculptures, photography and curatorial work. The most famous and ground-breaking of Bourgeau's work plays on the relationship between iconic imagery and irreverent materials, together forming a new context often drawing upon current controversies and, perhaps, the willfully provocative....

An undiagnosed dyslexic, Bourgeau never finished his education. He spent his teen years working at a box factory in his home town of Detroit. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The early work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs and paintings. Bourgeau has since remarked that he can only see 'right' through a camera lens.

Jef Bourgeau is the founding director of the Museum of New Art (MONA), of Detroit's artCORE (empty storefronts to galleries), and co-founder of the Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography.

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.