“If I could bottle the medicine to cure human beings, it would be humor. It brings people together, it doesn’t divide them,” says Olaf Breuning, a Swiss-born artist who lives in Kerhonkson. “When people have humor, it’s a buffer zone before you get serious about something. Life is a tragic event in general, we all die. And humor is something you can use as a softener.”
The use of levity as a way to help us access our humanity is a consistent through line in Breuning’s varied and celebrated career as an artist. His work is represented in galleries and museums around the world and spans myriad mediums: photography, painting, sculpture, film, drawings experiments with social media, NFTs, and AI. Breuning is 55 but has the playful energy of a teenager and can be relied upon to deliver unfiltered opinions on life and art that will make you snort with laughter.
It was a childhood gift that sparked Breuning’s love for art, and a tragedy that cemented his path. “My father gave me a camera when I was 15 years old, and I was obsessed. Then my mother died when I was 18 and it was a breaking point. That moment was when I realized I couldn’t work in an office and my passion was photography.”
Early inspiration from artists including Cindy Sherman gave Breuning a fascination with creating characters. It was one of these strange characters, named Sibylle, that he made a photograph of that launched him in the art world. Sibylle features a topless, reclining figure—smiling at the camera like a model would—with a red wig, devil horns, bread rolls for fingers, a severed stump of one leg and a rash of extra nipples covering one section of its torso. “The photograph Sibylle was one of the first works where I figured out my own language,” says Breuning. “I try to make art that is understandable to any person on the planet. Characters, or stereotypes, are recognizable. I want to talk about life in general, and our understanding of this world is full of images of characters like Vikings and knights.”
Making art more accessible to more people is a primary concern of Breuning’s. He is constantly absorbing cultural references and processing them through his work, leveraging their familiarity to draw people closer. Breuning describes this process as “opening the door” to art for people. “With some artists you have to find the door, then you open it. My door is open from the beginning, then you enter and you may get confused,” he says. “I want to make it as easy as possible to enter, to access. I was one of the first artists who brought horror film aesthetics [into art]; bringing the real world straight into the art without a filter.”
Over the years, Breuning has never stopped experimenting. The manicured lawn around his home is dotted with his sculptures, some crafted from the woods themselves. During the pandemic, with few human subjects available to photograph, he turned to painting: crafting wood blocks from the surrounding trees and using them as giant printing tools. Since moving to the Hudson Valley, Breuning describes being “brain-washed” by nature, and the local surroundings pop up in his work in unexpected ways.
Breuning’s sensibility animates this month’s cover image. Leave Me Alone depicts a Bigfoot family walking Abbey Road-like though Shawangunk pitch pines. It’s an image that has immediate impact: a glimpse of fantastical creatures in a picture-perfect natural setting. Once your brain settles, you can reflect on the dissonance between the image and the perma-digital state we all live in today, glued to screens and struggling to connect. Perhaps we too should aspire to be a family hiking in the wilderness, hands and big feet in lock-step, free from any knowledge of doom scrolls or comment trolls, happy to just smell the air then disappear from view.
This article appears in November 2025.
