NYAB Event - Robin Bruch Exhibition

Robin Bruch Exhibition

Leslie Fritz

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Leslie Fritz presents a selection of Robin Bruch’s current and past works for her first solo show in New York in nearly a decade. These paintings and works on paper exemplify Bruch’s unflinching stylistic tendencies and almost shamanistic repetition of forms and compositions, which have been the foundation of her practice since the 1970s. These unapologetically spiritual works attest to the relevance of abstraction and the traditions of working from one visionary stance throughout the breadth of ones career.

Robin Bruch moved to New York City in the early 1970s after graduating from Bennington College and worked alongside a community of artists including Blinky Palermo, Brice Marden, Stephen Mueller, David Reed, and Harriet Korman. Sourcing the legacies of abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, and color-field painting, Bruch developed her tenacious ethos. Early achievements included exhibiting in Marcia Tucker’s 1975 Whitney Biennial and in Klaus Kertess’ now shuttered Bykert Gallery. Yet while other painters of her generation, particularly her male counterparts, grew steadily more prominent, Bruch exhibited less and less before leaving New York City permanently for upstate New York in the 1990’s, though she never ceased her relentless practice.

Bruch’s unusual synthesis of abstract expressionist brush strokes and geometric abstraction, the same paradigm that she had began with in the 1970s, will be on view, revealing the continuity between her current work and her paintings of past decades. Her compositions are arrangements of shapes and colors that actively push against one another. The recurring triangles, circles, and slightly skewed rectangular bands of color are used to create an unusual illusion of three- dimensionality that expands the visual space of her paintings. Bruch’s unique shape language articulated in the vibrant murkiness of her colors has become emblematic, steadfast to the spirit of abstract painting. Recent developments in her work include an increased sensibility of color and its haptic possibilities, as well as a deepened concern for painting as process. Bruch’s erasures by layering disclose a painterly vulnerability, and it is in this honesty where her expression is declared both intimate and profound.