In conversation with Aidan Dunne, Irish-German artist Thomas Brezing recounts a peripatetic early life and a present one still open to change
Aidan Dunne: In 2021 you had a show with Vera Klute, ‘The Loneliness of Being German’, at the Limerick City Gallery of Art. You are both German, both long settled in Ireland. When I saw the title, I thought about how you’ve expressed a need for some distance from Germany. I’ve had conversations with many artists who expressed pretty much the same sentiment, I mean, needing not to be somewhere.
Thomas Brezing: It’s true – I still feel that.
AD: That estrangement… your character of ‘Carpet Man’, a kind of performance role, in which you walked about wrapped up in a roll of carpet, seems to express both your estrangement from Germany and a more general apartness.
TB: Yes, and other things, maybe – emigration, how things change.
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