NYAB Event - Bruce Gagnier “Corpus”

Bruce Gagnier “Corpus”

Lori Bookstein Fine Art

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Lori Bookstein Fine Art announces an exhibition of recent plaster and bronze sculpture by Bruce Gagnier. This is the artist’s fifth solo show at the gallery.

For his latest exhibition, Gagnier continues to expand his exploration of the figure citing important influences from the past, particularly the Renaissance and Rodin. The artist evolves each sculpture as a continuous sketch in clay using modeling and collage techniques until a unique figure emerges. Working from the inside out and gauging the personification as the figure develops, Gagnier maintains a flux as he models, interrupting any synthesis of opposing techniques or promise of final solutions. This enables the painterly sculpture to emerge as a mix of the artist’s conscious decisions and memories, and that which is arbitrary and left open to chance, independent of his will or pre-determinate ideals of beauty or classicism. The figures express through this interplay, themes that human beings struggle with existentially and on a daily basis; the inner self and pressure imposed from without, whether social, moral, cultural or aesthetic.

Within the show are new, refined sculptures – Yrsa, May, and Odile – a development from previous works. Gagnier has smoothed away the bumps and valleys of the surfaces to create younger, harder looking figures; their inner and outer lives seemingly more in accord than with previous works. By avoiding easy formal solutions when working with and his figures, the artist allows them to manifest as honest and poignant characters, each exuding a mood and spirit wholly their own.