Carol Bruns (b. Des Moines, Iowa 1943) is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York, working in sculpture and drawing. She graduated NYU 1966 in Fine Arts, then attended the Art Students League, NYC and l'Academie de La Grande Chaumiere, Paris. She first exhibited in 1975 at OK Harris Gallery showing wall sculptures made from found supports cloaked with cloth and thin, colored plaster. In 1980 she was guest artist at the Caraccio Etching Studio, Orion Editions published her prints, and in 2002 she received a printmaking fellowship at the Women's Studio Workshop. From 2000-2006 she was in four two-person exhibitions at the Tew Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia. Group exhibitions continued throughout this time as well as community organizing (Dumbo Open Studios), curating (Persona, A New Look at Portraits 1997; Festival of Political Pleasure 2017), publishing several editions of artist's books (Pages, with Robert Jacks), and stage décor (Bellerophon Dance Company). In 2013 she was interviewed by Gorky's Granddaughter, and in 2019 received a Tree of Life grant and an Artists' Fellowship grant. Her most recent exhibitions were at The Parlour Bushwick in 2015, Sculpture Space in Long Island City in 2017, SRO Gallery in Brooklyn in 2017-18, Zurcher Gallery 2021, 2023, and a solo in 2023 at White Columns, NYC. She was awarded an artist's residency by the Saltonstall Foundation in 2023 and in 2024 a MYMA grant and residency at Virginia Center for Create Arts. Ms. Bruns also writes art essays and reviews exhibitions, two most recently published in d'Art International and artcritical.com.



STATEMENT

  


     I have been a practicing visual artist for sixty years. Primarily I work in sculpture and drawing using such forms as mask, animal totem, and European figure and portrait head, set in the context of this particular historic condition and place. Its human figures are non-gendered, about people. The art work includes and alternates the dark side of political life, humor, the grotesque, and an inner psyche-spiritual dimension addressing invisible forces, rendering it both topical and archetypal.
     In the last twenty years of sculpture making, its language has accessed styrofoam packing materials as well as paper laminates, a material I invented with layered newspaper and rice paste, malleable like clay yet permitting hollow forms. I also evolved a finishing plaster to brush onto it which creates a firm shell. These invented and found materials are complemented by cardboard, Hydrocal plaster, bamboo, cloth, and paint with the result of a handmade object in human-body scale. Its look is distinctive because of its long development, wide range, and unique materials.
     The process of my art is improvisation, a form of experience where time can return to its organic flow, with its variable qualities, in distinction to mechanical and intellectualized time channeled by clocks, ideas, programs, and schedules. Thus, improvisation is political as well as aesthetic, cooperating with its object world instead of seeking to control and dominate it. Now an eighty-one year old, the fruition of my lifelong focus on the human subject continues to unfold.