Art we love: Roland Brener’s Swinger

Among the many remarkable works in the current summer exhibition at the Olga Korper Gallery is a piece by the late Roland Brener (1942-2006) called Swinger. Swinger began in 1999, as a hand-built, laminated plywood figure of a standard-issue businessman in a standard-issue business suit, but grotesquely distorted by a “bloat and pinch”computer program the artist was using–with devastating satirical results. The original wooden Swinger was then made as a multiple (of 3) in tinted polyester resin and first exhibited in 2000.

As critic Gary Michael Dault wrote in Canadian Art magazine, the figure has been greatly distorted laterally: Dault speaks of its “horrid, flattened face, the sloping, moronic forehead, the atrophied flipper-like arms, the dangling, dwindling legs, the revolting swell of belly, an impossible girth (suit jacket wrapped tight like a sausage casing) devolving into a ghastly insect-like shell at the back….”

A few days ago, Gary Michael Dault revisited the piece, and talked to gallery owner and director Olga Korper about Roland Brener’s infinitely fresh, endlessly disturbing–and blackly amusing–Swinger.