Exhibition Mark Brusse. The Hand and the Sea
from 11 July to 13 September 2014
Mark Brusse. The hand and the Sea exhibition gathers around thirty works in the Cristel Editeur d’Art Centre. This outstanding artist, exhibited in more than fifty museums around the world–he also made monumental works erected on four continents– lived his childhood in Alkmaar, Holland, in a world of shores, beaches and winds. Then, after his education at the School of Fine Arts of Arnhem, he went after his destiny, and quickly exhibited his works as a painter and a sculptor. His first personal exhibition? It was in Paris in 1961. Then there was a striking personal exhibition in 1968 in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam. Since 1987, this tireless traveller draws on Korean paper (hanji). His work is colourful, inimitable, both a soft and strong poetry.
Works of Mark Brusse’s exhibition
Mark Brusse
shaman and magician
He own to the critic Pierre Restany a very acurate remark, often repeated by art historians: « Mark Brusse see the outside world with an inside view. » For specialists, this means that this prodigy, revealed as a sculptor in Paris in 1960, in the friendly movement of the Nouveaux Réalistes and the Fluxus group, escapes the common laws of mankind. Wasn’t he often dubbed the “shaman” – and again by Stéphane Carrayrou, in March 2010, when the LAAC in Dunkirk and the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe in Gravelines jointly opened the essential celebration of his work? Because the former student of the Arnhem School of Fine Arts, born in the Netherlands in 1937, had reached this point: a rich, powerful, thrilling body of work, honored by over two hundred solo exhibitions on four continents. « Mark Brusse has crossed over to the other side of the art world, reached only by the great creators. », had to testify the writter Jacques Vallet.
And yet, how can we define exactly the mark that Mark Brusse, an inexhaustible traveller, has left and will leave on the surface of the globe?
The easy way would be to think about the monumental stone and bronze that he erected in France, Italy, Holland, Morocco, South Korea, Japan, Ecuador and Taiwan. But it could also be that his imprint retains the soft, subtle glow of the incomparable painted images he has been creating since 1987. In this case, compositions on Korean mulberry paper, fed with natural pigments, chalk, pastels and the light-colored firebrand of his hand. For with this enchanter, the hand is obviously an extension of the mind! She succeeds in suggesting the unspeakable without muffling the mystery… Hence the impression that Mark Brusse has single-handedly reinvented both the colorful art of Japanese printmaking and the reign of shadows, souls and cosmic forces. In his imaginary world, water, earth, sky, fire and all living things vibrate like a plainchant.
« Forty years of formal research and an emotional, tactile and spiritual quest », warned Robert Bonaccorsi, in 2008, in praise of this peerless artist, whom every collector recognizes at a glance. Mark Brusse, an old shaman, is an eternal magician.
Christophe Penot
Art editor