Mark Brusse
The Works
Sun and Shadow
1988
200 x 80 x 28 cm
Wood, ceramics, mirror
Pipe Dream
1989
220 x 60 x 36 cm
Wood, glass, textile, ceramics, iron
In the quiet little corner
1989
76 x 45 x 48 cm
Wood, iron, and bamboo
About base
1990,
200 x 60 x 20 cm
Wood, ceramics, metal
Forgotten thoughts
1990
117 x 200 x 33 cm
Wood and ceramic
Volcano Bowl and Volcano Bowl 2
1989
119 x 90 cm
Indian ink, watercolor, oil pastel on kraft paper.
The Stämpfli Foundation has eight works donated by Mark Brusse, a Dutch artist who has lived in Paris since 1961: six wooden sculptures and two mixed media paintings on paper.
About base from 1990 was the first work to arrive at the Foundation. The title could have a meaning linked to American slang, in a youthful context of first dates involving physical contact. Looking at the image, one can understand the humor of the expression. Along with three other sculptures, Tale, Pipe Dream, and Sun and Shadow, they are part of a series in which wood is the main material and protagonist. They are frontal and vertical in format, taking the human figure as their measure.
A type of found wood is used, raw, treated very little or not at all to allow it to remain sensitive to its own changes; it can be seen that it has changed over time.
The wood acts as a habitat for the objects that the artist has placed there: bamboo canes, glasses, textiles, and figurines made of bronze or ceramic. These objects are both found and handcrafted. For example, a long bamboo stalk reproduced in ceramic makes rigid what is naturally flexible. By taking the objects out of their context and bringing them together, the viewer is forced to look at each one in a very different way.
The titles allude to fantasy, desire, dreams, oblivion, and hidden energy. Brusse considers his sculptures to be anti-monuments that speak of the buried personal world, bringing forth a psychic landscape: they are loaded with allusions, sensations, and disguised affections.
He makes expressionistic use of objects and materials, whose properties become symbolic: the solidity and warmth of wood, drips that evoke wounds, laboratory and hospital pipettes. He integrates soft and hard elements, bronze casts of animals, plants, and small flexible bodies from the natural world and chance.
Throughout the 1960s, he lived in Paris, New York, and Berlin. Moving from country to country encouraged encounters and visual experiments. Without belonging to any particular trend, she was close to several. In Paris, she was close to Nouveau Réalisme and the use of materials taken from reality; in New York, to minimalism due to the size and monumentality of the pieces produced; in Berlin, to Fluxus and the ephemeral sense of life expressed in happenings and street actions.
Forgotten thoughts is a horizontal sculpture defined by a wide wooden beam that acts as a bridge (or garden bench), connecting the two figures at either end, which are placed on two large wooden blocks. Each block acts as a pedestal, supporting the figures and reinforcing the distance between them. The two figures are made of ceramic using different types of earth or clay.
The titles, like all of Bruse’s works, allude to fantasy, dreams, oblivion, and imprisoned or dormant energy. The artist considers his sculptures to be anti-monuments, possibly because they speak of the buried personal world, bringing to the surface a psychic landscape in which objects are laden with allusions, sensations, and disguised emotions, inviting the viewer to reflect.
Throughout his work, he makes expressive use of objects and materials with symbolic properties: the hardness of wood, drips that evoke wounds, laboratory and hospital pipettes. The wood is found. He integrates soft and hard elements, bronze casts of animals, plants, and small flexible bodies from the natural world and chance.
Throughout his life, he has lived in Paris, New York, and Berlin, and his moves between countries have fostered encounters and visual experiments. Without belonging to any particular trend, in Paris he was close to Nouveau Réalisme; in New York, to minimalism; and in Berlin, to Fluxus, with its ephemeral sense of life expressed in happenings and street actions.
Both paintings, Volcano Bowl, 1 and 2, allude to fantasy, dreams, oblivion, and imprisoned or dormant energy. Brusse’s works speak of the buried personal world and bring forth a psychic landscape where objects are loaded with allusions, sensations, and disguised affections, proposed for the viewer’s reflection.
The technique used in the two Volcano bowl paintings originated during his long stays in the East, Japan, and Korea in the 1980s. There he discovered hanji paper, on which he began to produce paintings that were then glued to canvas using the maruflage technique (paper glued onto any support).
The title associates the function of the domestic bowl, which preserves the heat of its liquid contents, with the idea of the crater of a volcano, through which the energy concentrated inside the living organism—the Earth—is released. In the images, the source of the heat comes from two rounded gray shapes that blend in with the color of the background.
The artist
(1937, Alkmaar, Països Baixos)
Throughout his work, he makes expressive use of objects and materials with symbolic properties: the hardness of wood, drips that evoke wounds, laboratory and hospital pipettes. The wood is found. He integrates soft and hard elements, bronze casts of animals, plants, and small flexible bodies from the natural world and chance.
Throughout his life, he has lived in Paris, New York, and Berlin, and his moves between countries have fostered encounters and visual experiments. Without belonging to any particular trend, in Paris he was close to Nouveau Réalisme; in New York, to minimalism; and in Berlin, to Fluxus, with its ephemeral sense of life expressed in happenings and street actions.