Kees Bruin: Visions of the Real

Description

Two years after graduating from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, Kees Bruin was exhibiting alongside Leo Bensemann, Don Binney, Doris Lusk, Trevor Moffitt, Peter Siddell, Olivia Spencer-Bower, Grahame Sydney, Robin White, and Brent Wong. For more than five decades of dedicated painterly practice and exhibition, Kees Bruin has established a unique visionary identity within the framework of New Zealand realism that is enthusiastically commissioned and collected internationally. His three overlapping categories, photo-realism, super-realism and what he terms 'visionary-realism', sprang from a personal search for all things truth. As well as using paint to express beauty for its own sake, his clever use of symbol has gifted us exquisite panoramic landscapes, expressions of cultural pursuits such as surfing and skateboarding often imbued with metaphor, single and group portraits, reinterpretations of masters, especially the Dutch Golden Age, elaborate 'still-lifes', and works that explore elements of western Judaeo-Christian histories combined with contemporaneous fashions, settings and views to and from the earth. This personal genre launches us as art viewers into emotional odysseys of timeless human concern... spirituality, sex, betrayal, vanity, loss, life and death, the universe, beauty, and truth.

With degrees in art history and classics, John C. Stringer brings a depth to appreciating both contemporary and ancient art as an expression of human culture. Having worked in both the church and the art sector, he is qualified to unpack Kees Bruin's unique painting career. Stringer is a published author and historian with interests in archaeology, faith and art. He lives in Christchurch with his wife, Laurie. They have five children, four grandchildren, and two British bulldogs. John continues to write and research on history, art history and faith and is a practising artist himself.

Kees Bruin is a photo-realist artist whose paintings trade in the accuracies and ambiguities of the genre, contesting its certainties with an invitation to a more generous reality. Layered in symbolism, mythology, spirituality and the humanities, his paintings are an extraordinary perspective on the world that we all briefly occupy and call our home. - Warren Feeney