In his first exhibition at the Erna Hecey Gallery, the French, Berlin-based artist Guillaume Bručre is showing a range of recent paintings and sculptures.

The first impression created by Guillaume Bručre’s works is one of expressive directness. His large-scale canvases betray a great deal of physical input. The artist treats the canvas with paint, fabric and paper in a dynamic working process. In Claudia auf der Messe in London with a bomb in her bag (2007) the body of the central figure is shaped by modelling the fabric directly on the canvas. While the fabric hides the canvas surface, the artist uses paint to make the figures nonetheless appear transparent, skeletonizing them with fine brushstrokes. The faces exhibit Ensoresque grimaces, the animals becoming demonic attributes.
A preoccupation with the animal as ‘natural body’ runs through the majority of Bručre’s work. In Selbstbildnis als Wurm (Self-Portrait as Worm, 2007), animal and human meld to form a chimera. Gregor (2007), an almost human-sized beetle sculpture in a coffin-like display case, alludes to Kafka’s post-metamorphosis beetle body, already fully divorced from the human form. The themes of life and death resonate in this work, along with the departure from the usual visual reality.
In their book Mille Plateaux, Gille Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed the concept of “becoming-animal”. They emphasise that the act of “becoming” is not a matter of imitation in this case, but rather of devoting oneself to this different form of movement. In Bručre’s work, “becoming-animal” in a picture signifies a way to free the body from moral consciousness, and the artwork itself takes on the quality of an act of self-liberation.

Guillaume Bručre was born in 1976 in Châtellerault. He graduated from the Academy of Arts in Nantes. Between the years 1998 and 2002 Bručre worked in the studios of numerous artists – among others Jacques Villeglé and Thomas Hirschhorn. His work has been presented at the Art Museum Tourcoing (2006) and the Kunstverein Paderborn (2007). In 2007 he was nominated by Robert Fleck for the Max Pechstein Förderpreis. Guillaume Bručre lives and works in Berlin.

With special thanks to Yannick Courbčs from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing.