Paintings
Abstracts
To give these abstract figures an emblematic, if slightly unhinged, appearance, the artist utilised a wide range of synaesthetic colour values and took great delight in leaving the viewer at the same time confused and enchanted. One such example is the bizarre Bird Eating Man Eating Bird. We observe a bespectacled, egg-headed scientist furiously hammering code into an ancient mainframe computer blissfully unaware of the peculiar, bird-like monstrosity howling abuse him. At the same time an equally strange, long-necked creature is staring gormlessly into the imagined photographer’s lens as if asking us what all the fuss is about. Personage is equally confusing. Are we viewing a spaced out paranoid playing with the controls of some god-awful infernal machine or are we just simply observing the poor wretch playing with himself?
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Eva
The Eva series has always been at the forefront of the collection. The artist saw Eva as symbolising all human life and as it is her children who have, through their destructive behaviour, caused their own downfall it is she who must be tormented on their behalf. Only through her physical suffering can humanity be freed from its fate before re-emerging from beneath the seas to proclaim, together with its saviour, a new era of enlightenment. Such was the artist’s vision. It is a vision that has lead to a series of largely anatomical self-portraits that many people consider her finest work.
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Presenza
These enigmatic paintings have as their inspiration a strange, recurring dream the artist experienced over four consecutive nights in Rome in October 1971: “At first I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. I would end [the dream] at a certain point, only to take it up at exactly the same place the following night. But I soon realised I had nothing to fear as I knew I was receiving a message from God instructing me to understand and interpret Her revelation and to present it to humanity in the only way I knew how – through the expression of my art” (1) The difficulty when describing her paintings in this or any of the other series in the collection is that she often gave the same meaning when describing different scenes, and sometimes gave the same scenes different meanings.
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I Tarocchi
The tarocchi cards take us to a dimension of bizarre imagery inhabited by grotesque, twisted characters, weird pictorial metaphors, strange environments and deep symbolism.
The artist, reluctant as ever to give too much away, viewed these works as symbolising metaphysics, mysticism and truths of so subtle and divine an order that to “express them boldly in human language would be a sacrilege”
This rather grandiose statement, like others she has made, tends to obscure the humour that can be found in much of her work, and which is displayed in abundance in this series. Drunkien felines, shifty-eyed immoral monks and all manner of machiavellian rogues make frequent appearances.
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Landscapes & Seascapes
The visual stimulation gained from viewing these works separated from the intrusion of the human figure goes some way, we hope, to explaining why we have not included them in the Eva series where, strictly speaking, they should really belong. In the artist’s mind civilization, until its redemption, is submerged and scattered throughout the great oceans of the world. Entire cities exist (and indeed function to a degree) underwater, their inhabitant’s fate determined by their level of spiritual understanding where the elevated and enlightened few are transported to the surface in great circular glass ships to begin their second lives, free from the contamination of those they have left behind.
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Arte Riciclata
The esoteric mindset of the artist had a tendency at times to bypass Planet Earth, which is why she was never interested in politics, nor for that matter did she ever pay anything other than lip service to the environmental movement.
It is important to bare this in mind when considering her Arte Riciclata paintings as some confusion has arisen concerning their origin. They have incorrectly been classed as either Eco-Art’, the recycling of materials with an environment- friendly ethos or, more usually, Arte Povera.
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Faceless Humanity
The artist held a rather pessimistic view in relation to Humankind’s fate and the scriptures she composed concerning this matter at times make for uncomfortable reading (as they must have sometimes been writing) Her foundation does not accept the inevitability of her predictions yet, in so far as her beliefs, as we have written elsewhere, were to Bruna X inseparable from her art, we have decided to include the Faceless Humanity series on this site.
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Other Works
We have only separated the main series in the collection. Other series, and important stand-alone works, are now briefly discussed:
The artist always adored animals, particularly horses. Her equine portraits owe more to the gracefully rounded forms frequently depicted by Franz Marc than the meticulous anatomical studies we see in the works of George Stubbs and other academic painters, and portray a fresh, powerful and direct vision.
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