Purple Book

Chicken or Pasta? is the Olaf Breuning Purple Book, a special edition issued alongside Purple Fashion Magazine's Spring/Summer 2012 issue, No. 17. Purple Institute published it as a softcover, the sixteenth title in the Purple Book series.

Like the other Purple Books, it functions as a stand-alone artist's project rather than a conventional monograph, built around Breuning's own images and humor rather than an editor's survey of past work. Its punning airline-menu title matches the deadpan, absurdist tone Breuning brings to his photographs, videos and installations.

Breuning, born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1970, lives and works in New York. His photographs and videos stage theatrical, often absurd scenarios, restaging tourist clichés, exotic props and studio artifice in works such as Home 1/Home 2 and Easter Bunnies, and he has shown at the Tinguely Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Musee Rath, among others.