Laura Bruce

Born 1959 in East Orange/NJ, lives and works in Berlin
www.artnews.org/laurabruce

Galleries:
fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin









In complex and varied work, largely accomplished over the past 17 years while she has lived as an American expatriate in Berlin, Laura Bruce has explored and excelled at paintings, sculptures, videos and, in a couple of instances, performances. This wide-ranging art reveals a distinct, highly idiosyncratic sensibility; from her vantage point in Berlin, Bruce revisits - with intensity and humor, brooding seriousness and obvious delight - a middle-class America that retains strong working-class roots, and this includes suburban houses, backyards and front lawns; recreation rooms in the basement of those houses; kitchens cluttered with knickknacks; country music on the radio; the family car in the driveway.

Now Bruce has pared her complex art down to a seemingly rudimentary basis: large black and white graphite drawings on paper. These drawings of quintessentially American houses and yards, and of people outside those houses, are visually enthralling, with all their intricate mark making, nuances of color (in a palate that is black and white), and juxtapositions of plenitude and emptiness. Throughout, fractious activity abuts moments of beatific serenity, while scruffy and unruly zones merge with areas that are delicate and ethereal. Often, foliage, towering trees, and expansive skies are powerful and dynamic, and suggest the outsized splendor, enchantment, bedazzlement and thrilling adventure of carnival attractions. Bruce’s unexpectedly wild and spectacular backyard environments posit heightened consciousness, possible ecstasies, and palpable catharsis, and invest routine scenes in suburban New Jersey or exurban Atlanta with a nature-based wonderment that connects, however subtly or implicitly, with the spiritually charged, nineteenth-century paintings of European Romanticism, the Hudson River School in America, and American Luminism.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008: The Hunt, fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin
2006: Landowners, Galerie Pankow, Berlin
2004: The Wide, Büro für Kunst, Dresden

Bibliography:
Gregory Volk, “Backyard Spectacular,” in Laura Bruce, exh. cat. fruehsorge contemporary drawings, Berlin 2008
Laura Bruce, texts by Mark Gisbourne, Uta Grundmann, and Jan Verwoert, exh. cat. Büro für Kunst, Dresden 2004
Thin Skin, exh. cat. Independent Curators International, New York 2002