„THE HUNT“
Private View: Saturday, 5.April.2008, 6 p.m.
Duration of the show: 5.4.-10.5. 2008
Human beings have always tried to gain power over nature. What used to be a pure fight for existence nowadays lives on as a classy tradition in the fashion of hunting. The trophies on the walls of our own homes are an emblazoning insignia to verify this ostensible predominance.
But is it really possible to overwhelm nature? This is the question that Laura Bruce asks in her work. In her oeuvre she reflects on ambivalent relationship between human beings and nature. Through nurturing and nursing, through trimming and culling, nature is brought into a decorative form- domesticated, cultivated.
But the influence of nature is always visible in Laura Bruce´s works. Tremendous trees jut out behind the garden paradises, winding themselves with their imposing shadows around the occupied territories of men. Dogs streak like wolves through the countryside while a man swims calmly; sure of his power over this creature. The observer starts to doubt: does this scene show a harmonic symbiosis or a fight for power? Also in Laura Bruce´s style of drawing, this contrary relationship can be found. Very delicately, she plays with contrasts, with light and shadow, whose objects are elusive. Like this, she effects a switch in the viewer’s sense of expectation. These scenes seem to be harmonic, ordinary, familiar; only an intensive reflection opens the view to a more complex level. But the image might contain underlying messages. Like a picture puzzle, the empty landscape changes into a lively spectacle. A tree turns into a blazing fire; a man appears in the shrubbery. Nature reveals its majestic, sublime, energetic but also threatening traits and lets the people step into the background.
The attention of the viewer is caught by contrasts between powerful, fidgety pencil strokes and subtle, almost vanishing lines. Like this she entices the recipient to an intensive analysis of the physical and the metaphysical, and brings nature back to the human universe. She inaugurates a new horizon of consciousness for a versatile reality, in which the limits between good and bad blur. Beauty and horror oscilate. Consequently, this hunt ends successfully.
A catalogue of the show will be available.
