Carol Bruns (Installation View), via White Columns
Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bruns marks her latest solo exhibition and first in Manhattan in over two decades with a body of recent works on view this summer at White Columns, continuing the artist’s work in a range of materials and forms that negotiate languages and ways of creating and approaching art and its production.
Carol Bruns (Installation View), via White Columns
Bruns’ exhibition comprises a group of more than twenty wall-, pedestal- and floor-based figurative sculptures made over the past two years, including a major new sculptural installation, Fringe Elements, 2023. The show is, by the artist’s own description, an inquiry into the human condition, twisting and turning the human form into new modes and arrangements through a range of both biological and non-biological materials: bitumen, chalk, ash and dirt, teeth, and hemp as well as paper, Styrofoam, bamboo, and plaster are spread across the surfaces and comprise the hidden interiors of her works, an alchemical process that seems to take the human form, twist it formally away from itself, while rebuilding it up with new materials and modes.
Carol Bruns (Installation View), via White Columns
Citing Andre Breton, the artist’s work seems to mine just these notions of contradiction and tension. Alluding to the figuration of Janus, a god who faces both ways at once, the artist seems to expressly address and mine that tension of simultaneity and spontaneity in her works. “I utilize this theme to give unreason, the irrational, even the bestial its due, not as approval but to acknowledge its part in the forces that bring culture into existence and sustain it,” she writes. “It establishes a practical relationship to the catastrophic violence of our times, for the enemy is always part of ourselves.”
This clear interest in contradiction seems well-adapted to these works, the human form reaching outside itself while looking deep into the material language of the earth to build it back up. The artist’s work was on view through August 26th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
White Columns [Exhibition Site]
