Police doing AcroYoga or acrobats wearing full combat gear of the French CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité). Four of them pile on top of each other on a park bench, their heads lying relaxed on each other’s chest, looking up at the sky. In another constellation, one of them is lying on his back like a beetle, balancing a partner on his armorclad hands and feet. Their identity is concealed under the visors of the helmets. The absurdity and the playfulness of the scenes are amusing, since the executive of the state power is ridiculed or portrayed in a peaceful, lovable light.

However, it can only be a parallel universe in which the expensive military uniforms are not used for defense or force, but for acrobatics and flirting. Make Love Not War.

(The CRS are comparable to the German riot police, i.e. used in large scale demonstrations. The predecessor organization was the paramilitary groupes mobiles de réserve of Vichy France)

– Nadia Pilchowski

The cause for the erection of the monument to Melania is Brad’s first visit to Slovenia in the summer of 2018, when he discovered that it is the birthplace of the First Lady of his homeland. Another motivation could certainly be the aggressive anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies of her husband. So Brad decided to commemorate this contradiction named Melania together with a team of Slovenian colleagues and the local community. After choosing and buying the poplar tree and after meeting and bringing Maxi – an amateur chainsaw sculptor, born in the same month of the same year and in the same maternity ward as Melania – into the project, the monument was unveiled last year in Rožno, near Sevnica, on the day when the American people celebrate the declaration of their independence.

One part of the art project is also the documentary film, a portrait of Maxi, which shows the crucial steps in the making of the sculpture. Brad and his colleagues then began to make replicas of the statue, based on the cast of the original. Exactly one year after the unveiling, on the 4th of July 2020, unknown perpetrators burned down the monument in Rožno. Brad then removed it and, joining forces with the local community that took care of the monument and its surroundings, erected a bronze replica. Melania is a multi-layered project that is simply not allowed to conclude by everything that is happening around it. 

– Karlo Hmeljak

The MELANIA Bronze edition by Brad Downey is a detailed miniature of the original bronze sculpture installed by the US artist on a tree stump near Melania Trump's Slovenian hometown. Originally created by a Slovenian artist with a chainsaw from a tree trunk, the world's first sculpture of the American First Lady reflects both the anti-immigrant policies of the 45th U.S. President and the paradox of his own wife's immigrant background.

The sculpture received worldwide media coverage. The first wooden version was set on fire by an unknown person on July 4, 2020, the American national holiday, and was subsequently replaced by Downey with a full-size bronze. The edition of eighty was produced in Slovenia.

Brad Downey is a Berlin-based, Kentucky-born conceptual artist. His hyper-diverse approach allows him recognition across multiple art fields. Working across media, he employs spontaneous sculptures, abjected assemblages, unsolicited interventions, silent alterations, and slapstick formalism. By challenging, adapting and manipulating rather than by accepting given forms, norms, and regulations of artistic production, Downey’s rather anti-authoritarian work ventures into uncharted territories and somehow evades an unambiguous definition. In spite of this, his work always evinces a taste for comic anarchy and a love of physical engagement and improvisation.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Reverse Culture Shock, MU, Eindhoven (2018); Vernissage, Overcoat Gallery, Moscow (2017); Souvenirs, Ruttkowski; 68, Cologne (2015); Damaged Goods, Cuadro Gallery, Dubai (2015). Recent group exhibitions include: Skin-Fade, Disconnected, Slick-Back, Simulaker Gallery, Novo Mesto (2018); Cultural Hijack, Archip, Prague (2017); Art and the City: Graffiti in the Internet Age, Electromuseum, Moscow (2017); Essentials, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2017); Planet B, NRW Forum, Duesseldorf (2016); Wertical I, Michael Horbach Foundation, Cologne (2016). Downey was awarded Stiftung Kunstfonds for his catalogue publication “Slapstick Formalism: Process, Project, Object.”