Lavrenty Bruni. Midsummer Night’s Dream

Artvera’s Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Lavrenty Bruni: Midsummer Night’s Dream, on view June 13 – September 13, 2014. The exhibition will showcase over 30 works by the Moscow-based contemporary artist, including oil paintings and watercolors, reflective of the artist’s longtime fascination with ballet. Lavrenty Bruni will be available for interviews on June 12th. To set up an interview, please contact the gallery.

The title of the exhibition is a playful reference to the dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s beloved comedy. In his large-scale oil paintings and watercolors, the artist explores the complexity of dance, capturing the transition and change in a static image. Echoing the play’s theme of reality versus illusion, Bruni’s dancers are rendered in pale, monochromatic tones and posses an ethereal quality. The abstracted backgrounds in these paintings conceal their location, further blurring the lines of reality while the recurring motif of flower petals invokes the magical Fairyland. Bruni often uses flowers in his paintings and is famous for his masterful canvasses of bouquets and scattered flowers (the exhibition of his works entitled Flowers was shown at Artvera’s in 2011).

Like other artists preoccupied with dance—Degas, Léger, Jacob, and Renoir, to name a few—Bruni’s paintings are born from meticulous observations of dancers’ routines. The artist’s models are prima ballerinas of the Bolshoi Theater whose names are familiar to ballet connoisseurs. Yet the artist is not interested in making these famous dancers recognizable, focusing solely on capturing the movements of their bodies and conveying balance, grace, and radiance associated with the art of ballet and, above all, his own deep sensitivity to and appreciation of beauty.

Born into an artistic dynasty, Lavrenty Bruni (b. 1961) is one of Russia’s leading contemporary artists. His aristocratic family, whose ancestors came from Mendrisio (Ticino, the Italian speaking part of Switzerland) and emigrated to the Tsarist Empire in the 18th Century, has produced at least one painter in every generation. Lavrenty Bruni completed his studies of classical painting and drawing at the University of Moscow. He exhibits in solo and group shows and has works in private collections worldwide, including Australia, Japan, The United States of America, The United Kingdom, Russia, Hong Kong, Israel, South Africa, France, and Belgium. He lives and works in Moscow, Russia.