13.02.-29.03.2025
Gudrun Brüne
Blumenball und Puppensträuße
Opening reception
Thursday 13. February 18:00-21:00 | 19:00 Welcome words by Dr. Petra Lange
What is the human being? An easily manipulated cognitive system? A biochemical apparatus, a constantly optimizing cultural machine, a herd animal? These questions are as topical as they are surprising, as they are posed to us by works by the painter Gudrun Brüne, born in 1941.
While her husband Bernhard Heisig (†2011), one of the great founding members of the Leipzig School in the GDR, is being celebrated this year on the 100th anniversary of his birth, we wanted to dedicate a solo exhibition to Gudrun Brüne, one of the few female representatives of this group, during her lifetime in her native city of Berlin. Gudrun Brüne passed away on January 25. We are deeply touched that she will not see her exhibition. The exhibition is now a memorial event.
Gudrun Brüne's realistic style follows the craftsmanship of the Leipzig School as well as its self-image of the artist as an attentive observer of society. At the beginning of the 1980s, the “Grande Dame of the Leipzig School” found her unmistakable visual language with the discovery of doll and mask motifs. Her doll paintings are allegorical portraits of people; the masks are symbols of concealment and appearance. It seems as if her paintings reflect what will become of us if we blindly abandon ourselves to the whimsical fashions, role models and entertainments of our time.
Masks conceal reality, mimic identity. Dolls function as people's alter egos, on which they work off their fantasies and desires. Projection bodies of fantasies. The memento mori that appears in the works may be a disguise for what the artist is actually concerned with: the awareness of life and its fragile value and, against this background, the meaning of man in the socio-political game. Gudrun Brüne puts her finger in an open wound.
The bouquets of flowers that continually accompany her artistic path also belong to this group of themes. According to Brüne, you always have to hurry when painting still lifes, because flowers wilt and life passes quickly. This thought always found its way into her meticulous work with the real models.
But there is another side to her work. The model dolls of Gudrun Brüne are witnesses to a bygone era. They are not results of industrial mass production (Barbies never came into question as models for the painter), but examples that can only be collected today — and loved nostalgically. They bear the traces of their stories in the form of paint scratches, hair loss or loose, mended limbs with a mixture of indifference and pride.
The modern world always knows at least two truths and countless facades behind which the One is hidden. How about dropping the masks?
Our special thanks go to Johanna von Koppenfels, who made it possible for her mother's exhibition to take place as planned.
About the artist
Born in Berlin on March 15, 1941, Gudrun Brüne lost her father in 1943 during a submarine mission in the Second World War. Her vocational education began in 1956 with an apprenticeship as a bookbinder in Pößneck, Thuringia. In 1961, she studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, graduating in 1966. She then worked as a freelance artist in Leipzig, occasionally working in Bernhard Heisig's studio. From 1979, Gudrun Brüne taught painting and graphics at Burg Giebichenstein University in Halle (Saale). In 1987 she was awarded the GDR Art Prize. After marrying Bernhard Heisig in 1991, they couple began building the studio house in Strodehne, Havelland, where she lived and worked after Heisig's death in 2011.
Her work has been exhibited since 1969, including initially all GDR art exhibitions in Dresden and larger exhibitions in East and West Berlin, as well as (after the reunificationl) abroad: Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Helsinki, Stockholm, Prague, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge. In 1988 she was shown at the Venice Biennale and in 1993 at the Triennial for Realist Art at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. This was followed in the 1990s by various art fairs in the USA (New York, Chicago, San Francisco), an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin in 2004 and at the Museum Barberini Potsdam in 2017. In 2021, exhibitions were held at the Museumshaus Güldener Arm Potsdam and, curated by Dr. Petra Lange, at Schloss Ribbeck in Havelland to celebrate her 80th birthday. Works in public collections: Galerie Neue Meister Dresden, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Pushkin Museum Moscow, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Ludwig Collection, Kunsthistorisches Museum Magdeburg and others.
©Foto-360Degrees.art