Essay for the catalog ROHKUNSTBAU 2019

Mark Gisbourne

A synthesis of viewpoints is also present in the two-room pencil and graphite drawings installation of Laura Bruce. They are sensual landscape drawings of both locality and of memory, drawings encompassing the fact that she has lived in Germany for the last twenty years, are yet fused with a reminiscent sense of her own Georgia and New Jersey childhood. A close analysis of the works reveals an intuited and abstracted sense of vision on several levels, and not merely in terms of the drawn material applications, subtle speculative hatching contrasted with intense passages of graphite mark making, but rather they are not so much descriptive as an imbued consciousness of place. While this forms a visual paradox of sorts, the viewer has a feeling of substantial ephemerality, an intuited materialisation of landscape that reaches out towards and into the phenomenological ungraspable. The drawings echo what Maurice Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “sensible insensible” when recalling perceptions of landscape and the mysterious interface of the perceiving eye with the conscious mind.ⁱ This said the introduction of a text-based drawing Follow the train tracks…evokes not merely the fact of the poetics of landscape, but the visual nature of text through words expressed in drawn-written language, and while the languages most common to us are driven by phonetics, the ancient origins of early language lie in those sources like the hieroglyph, pictogram and the ideogram.ⁱⁱ And in reading the text-based drawing you become simultaneously immersed in the tactile facture of the letters as marks as much as the words. The artist Laura Bruce is very aware and sensitive to the conflictive nature of the urban and rural context, something very salient and relevant to understanding the present anxieties about the polarised state of Trump’s America.ⁱⁱⁱ In drawings like stillstand and Limbo we see expressions of an imagined periphery where the two contraries meet and take on a vague sense of a place without specificity. They seem to indicate regardless of the exact location where they were first seen or imagined by the artist, that they have an incommunicable sense of puzzling aporia and disjunction. Within the abraded fabric of the Schloss Lieberose the massing of elements in the drawings, her use of abstracted clouds and repeated natural forms interplay with the fractured walls and material ruptures of the chosen room in which they are exhibited. To speak of the “gap” in Bruce’s drawings is therefore somewhat complex, for they touch upon the interstices of a materialised presence and a subliminal sense of melancholy, and as a result we are made conscious of the simultaneity of opposed sensations as either celebration or psychical uncertainty.

Backyard Spectacular (Reprise)

Gregory Volk

In complex and varied work largely accomplished over the past 20 years while she has lived as an American in Berlin, Laura Bruce has explored and excelled at paintings, sculptures, videos and performances. Over the past several years large black and white graphite drawings on paper have also become an important part of her oeuvre. Bruce’s mesmerizing drawn suburban “snapshots ” are based in part on her native suburban New Jersey and exurban Atlanta. In them you see houses, yards, people outside of those houses, and circumscribed nature (a few leafy trees, manicured lawns, small patches of forest) which is exceptionally powerful and majestic, but also threatening and unnerving. With their backyard wonderment and neighborhood sublimity, Bruce’s 21^st century drawings—which have been exhibited widely to considerable acclaim—have echoes of 19^th century European Romantic painting and Hudson River School painting in the U.S.

While intently focusing on drawing, Bruce has also expanded her oeuvre to include striking architectural installations/interventions. Jane (2010), one of her two works in the Fokus Lodz Biennial in Poland, was a stunning painting installation for which Bruce first restored and repaired the former restaurant/bar in a once grand, but later decrepit, building. Using special colors made by mixing fluorescent hues in white wall paint, she then painted the walls and ceiling blue, the floor a light green, cupboards pale purple, and lamps bright yellow, resulting in a highly mediated interior version of the outside at dusk, including the sky, clouds, grass, and stars. Derelict (2010), also in Poland, featured a swirling charcoal drawing that climbed up one wall and angled across the ceiling, while a fluorescent pink painted form swept across the floor and spread up part of a neighboring wall. These installations led to De Sepentrione ad Austrum (2015) in Aschersleben, Germany, one of Bruce’s signature projects: a permanent wall mural made of color pastel on green school board paint.  Bruce’s bedazzling and engrossing site-specific drawing is based on a 1649 map by Adam Olearius, an explorer and an illustrious citizen of Aschersleben who ventured to Persia and the Caspian Sea, among many other places. With its mesh of hand drawn lines and subdued yet vibrant colors, Bruce’s work evokes distant, marvelous lands and also hints at the intricacies of Persian carpets.

Bruce has also expanded her approach to drawing to include handwritten textual drawings, sculptures that seem in part like three-dimensional drawings, and a series of graphite and color pencil drawings (eventually there will be 79) based on Goya’s print series Los Caprichos (1797-98). In Bruce’s drawing North (2008), a man routinely walks his dog down the street, but the familiar environs have morphed unpredictably. Small trees and their cast shadows (and the small trees appear to be spinning like cyclones), huge leaning trees overhead, houses that are perhaps smoldering, a tumultuous sky overhead, and in the middle of it all what could easily be the funnel of a tornado make the whole scene at once awe-inspiring and dangerous. In the handwritten, yet visually eventful drawing Follow the Train Tracks (2016), a local excursion doubles as a complex and mysterious voyage of discovery. In Rush (2012), a sculptural tableau made of painted wood atop a wood sawhorse, a small human figure outdoors seems wary of, but also enchanted by curving and looming cloud-like or perhaps wave-like forms, one yellow and the other black. At once playful and severe, whimsical and alarming, this highly mediated version of a sublime experience in nature is altogether compelling. While accomplished in different mediums and painstakingly made, Bruce’s works function as transportive forces, conjuring moments of revelation and surprise when one’s whole orientation is suddenly altered, challenged, and intensified.

Laura Bruce is also an accomplished—and this is a first for me, in terms of the art world and artists—singer and soulful interpreter of American country music.  She’s the charismatic lead singer in the international band Dangerpony, which performs decidedly fresh takes on country music songs; this deep engagement with such music is also apparent in Bruce’s art.  Her drawing and sound installation Goodbye is Half the Words You Know (2008-12) consists of ten portraits of esteemed country singers coupled with Dangerpony songs (which you hear on headphones), with Bruce singing lead. You see a portrait of Dolly Parton, with cascading hair, penetrating eyes, and a wide smile, while you listen to an amazing, especially haunting and plaintive, version of Parton’s famous song “Jolene.”  You are riveted by Bruce’s portrait of a stern George Jones while you listen to a searing rendition of his song “A Good Year for the Roses”, with Bruce’s voice shifting from solemn speech to caterwauling ferocity. Each song is a radical reinvention of a classic, while the installation, akin to listening booths in a library, invites an intimate absorption with both songs and drawings.

American country music deals in raw and honest emotions, fraught local scenes, interpersonal dramas, hopefulness, and staggering sorrow, and it is a generative force (one among several) in Bruce’s artworks. The 10 drawings in Sounds That Clouds Make (2012), each featuring curving and organic forms, some wispy light gray and others dense black, loosely evoke the ever-shifting shapes of passing clouds and channel them into an abstract musical score. These synesthetic drawings are at once serene and turbulent, graceful and ungainly, playful and severe, in a manner very similar to an excellent country song. They are also altogether enthralling.

Gregory Volk

NYC 2018

Laura Bruce

by Nicola Kuhn

An artist’s body of work is usually held together by style, medium, and material. It helps to identify the artist. But with Laura Bruce, this is not always the case. And yet — as different as the forms of expression are — her work is immediately recognizable through an internal cohesion, a continuity, which continues from series to series. But it would be wrong to simply define her style as something that constantly changes. Like Gerhard Richter, who oscillates between abstraction and representation as a painter, Laura Bruce can also not be tied down and has to try new things after a while. As she puts it: the story has been told. While Richter circumnavigates the medium of painting analytically and questions the canvas academically again and again, Laura Bruce intuitively continues to spin an invisible narrative thread, visually linking the different cultures she has been shaped by — her socialization at a young age in the United States and her present life in Europe.

The American artist, who has lived in Berlin since the early nineties, initially acquired a reputation for her graphite drawings of landscapes. Her large format works of bold strokes, clear contrasts of black and white, and the distinctive representation of trees, glades, and lakes, possess a monumentality and boldness that one would too easily like to attribute to the Midwest. The suggestion of lightweight houses and the sedan cars parked in front also point in this direction. But these places don’t exist. There’s something wrong. Sometimes the trees seem set in motion, rotating around their own axes, at times swirling air rises from the center, as if a tornado is sweeping through the drawing, sometimes organic forms, she calls them “blobs,” condense on the edges. It’s as if a different world is barging in, or a super-reality. The Surrealists introduced this principle of deliberate collision in their works, and this pictorial principle can also be attributed today to painters like Neo Rauch. In Laura Bruce’s landscape drawings, these irritations at first appeared more restrained, but in a much later series they take complete control.

In the drawing series, “Sounds That Clouds Make” the abstract forms become autonomous and perform a type of private dance — you can actually perceive sound, like in a new system of musical notation. Laura Bruce even talks about a musical score, and as a synaesthetic she always hears her work. There are no “real” clouds to be seen, but this is obviously sky, a different horizon. Her terrain has shifted from landscape to the heavens. There might not be a direct narrative in this series, but it comes back with even greater force in her word drawings of route directions and the simple listing of objects, plants, or the things you see on the way.

“Follow The Train Tracks” is the beginning line of one of these graphite drawings of route directions. It covers the entire surface of the paper and directs the reader at first along the artist’s former route from the train station to her grandmother’s home in Asbury Park, New Jersey — then to a pond, and then to a lake, where suddenly “you will see a man submerged to his knees in water and a black dog swimming outwards towards a stick.” The present unexpectedly breaks into these matter-of-fact instructions, given to perhaps future walkers or visitors, and the abrupt description of a simple fact leads our imagination ad absurdum. Laura Bruce applies the same principle in this series as in her landscape drawings. You can’t really trust the objects there either, blobs dart in and out between the trunks of trees — but in the word drawings, the irritation creeps in between the lines.

There is another continuation of abstraction in the work “Keeping Count.” Drawn with oil pastels on panel primed with black school board paint, it consists of colorful dashed lines that follow each other in a snake-like fashion, covering the entire surface. These could be words, sentences, or a litany. The content has become overly intricate and completely convoluted. But the title hints at an enumeration, a type of settlement. And once again these lined-up dashes take on a new musical dimension, movement, and rhythm.

Laura Bruce again works with the clash of abstract forms and concrete reality in the series “Nahm Platz auf der Hand” (Mount the Hand), colored pencil interventions on found fairy tale illustrations. The basis of this work is a book with lithographs by Edmund Brüning from 1902, which Laura Bruce found at a flea market. She then drew onto these historical illustrations of Hauff's fairy tales with colored pencils, giving the different images psychedelic elements: rampant knights grow colorful beards, the sky fills with iridescent bubbles, and Peter, the main character in the story “The Cold Heart,” after mounting the hand of the giant, is surrounded by many colorful lassos, as if he were riding a bronco. Laura Bruce crosses the solid world of German fairytales with the blatant joy of a Disney-like reality, a reminiscence of her own childhood. She rattles dignified historicism with fresh, surrealist interventions. The story of Peter, and of the knights and damsels, suddenly takes on a completely different narrative.

At the moment, Laura Bruce is working on a new series of drawings using graphite dust. Landscapes hidden under a turbulence of blues and grays with ascending colorful leaf-like forms. But they can also be abstract shapes, her “blobs,” in their next manifestation, only now more volatile.

Nicola Kuhn

June 2015, Berlin

Shepherds of the Trees

Jutta Mattern

Laura Bruce’s most recent, large format graphite drawings capture viewers and lure them into an enchanted, mythical world of forests and trees and ominous situations. We enter familiar but uncertain terrain, slowly approaching a mysterious no-mans-land. Laura Bruce is highly skilled in her handling of graphite. She covers the entire surface of the paper with miniscule lines that either gather to form dark areas and to add pictorial depth, or are applied sparsely and allow bare areas to emerge. These are sometimes strategically omitted to establish stark black-white contrasts in the drawings or to form empty areas
that look like they were stamped out or cut away. The various delicately developed gray nuances are formed by a type of “color bracket” and breathe life and turbulence into the drawings while adding a shimmering color quality, despite the fact that the works are always black and white.

But there is much more to discover here than skilled refinement. The drawings are dynamic and mysterious, they display forms that seem to gather and dissolve, and tell of a world threatened by humans or one comprised of apocalyptic images of dying forests. They are witness to our reckless handling of nature, which results in our inevitably demise. This apparent underlying atmosphere makes analyzing or interpreting Laura Bruce’s drawings a complex enterprise. Many of the works are subject to a menacing undertow that we happily allow to pull us along, drag us into the events, and that also compels us to navigate the place. Yet this is tricky, because as soon as a place to rest appears, we are enveloped by dust devil- or tornado-like spinning things, such as those depicted in Bruce’s black bushes, which rise from the ground and suck us into an uncontrollable whirlwind. These dynamic events are accompanied by isolated houses that seem threatened by indefinable dark smoke or fire formations that speed by, perhaps driven by the wind. Trying to escape the undertow, we stumble upon the blank white areas that lead to void-like spherical cavities. This makes it even harder to maintain our footing on the sloped undergrowth of the forest ground, particularly when it is swamped by a terrible deluge, as in the drawing Flood, where even the trees struggle to keep their hold. It is an indomitable force, but we remain the viewer and hope for salvation.

Laura Bruce creates scenes. They are places where we live and places of indispensable nature: the forest and its trees, which we still endeavor to tame and make hospitable, and, inasmuch, threaten. We press our way into mystifying worlds that can suddenly trick us.

Despite the looming menace in these drawings, they maintain an undeniably lyrical, even magical character, as can be seen in Stutter—and not only allow us to take part in the events, but also hint at appeasement. The trees are sometimes full of leaves, sometimes bare, and sometimes dead; they have thick bark or stripped trunks, and are staged by Laura Bruce as though subject to a very specific system of lighting. They structure the drawings into vertical and horizontal axes that establish a rhythm across surface. The
trees are also the elements that dominate the inherent narrative in Bruce’s drawings. Bruce’s compositional approach is strongly reminiscent of the floral ornamentalism of Jugendstil. They recall that era’s prevailing philosophy of natural rhythm and hint at the notion of the “sacred” forest—long a core element of fairy tales and fantasy novels. It
is a place often associated with religious devotion, where humans can enter into a relationship with the nature confronting them. It becomes a surface of projection for desire, fantasy, fears, and visions—a place of sacred wolves, forest gods, and trees endowed with numinous power.

Therefore it is not surprising when we imagine fleeting, stylized faces in tree trunks. They could be the faces of Rohan’s Shepherds of the Trees [1] who guard against evil and the destruction of nature by transforming into possessed creatures that embolden us and calm our fears.

Then, just as suddenly as we are pulled into the undertow of Laura Bruce’s pictorial narrative, she pulls us back out. She sends us to a stylized sculptural landscape made of wood, called Lake Day. In the drawings the moon seems to illuminate the forest, but Lake Day is lit by a single bare light bulb. The work is a spellbound lake landscape made from cut and carved wood. Every element in the piece is still, the ground is level, the wooden trees, some of which are painted a luminous greenish yellow, are immobile and strictly ordered. The lake surfaces have been cut out of the wooden base and convey a sense of calm. We are confronted in this work with a motionless scene, where we can follow our own rhythm and easily elude any sense
of threat.

1 The shepherds of the trees live in Rohan, which is translated as Land of the Horses. They are called Ents, Enyd, or Onodrim and in the novel Lord of the Rings, they are the protectors of the forests against Middle Earth. From J.R.R.Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, vol. II: The Two Towers, 1st edition, (Ballantine Books, 1965).

Jutta Mattern

2009, Cologne