.2024
Conceived as an epic spiral and punctuated by autobiographical accents, “The Song of Ages” exhibition is a foray into Bradt’s inner world, populated by personal reflections, reinterpretations of significant life experiences, figures belonging to the artist’s memory, from family and mentors, to acquaintances with fabulous life stories and to works that transform marginalized characters into contemporary apostles.
With a title inspired from the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga, “The Song of Ages” is much more than a selection of works; it is an elegy in images, because it has a strong meditative, tender and melancholic character, despite the hopeful message.
The exhibition proposes works from different creative stages of the artist, but especially recent, large-scale works, representative of current themes, formulas and means of artistic expression, whose modular execution allows both full and partial exposure, each module having its own life. The composition is planned in such a way that the message of the works is not diluted or lost through fragmentation.
Bradt’s latest work, “Halt Mich” (Hold Me!), eight and a half meters long, is a visual poem dedicated to love that does not take into account age, a counterweight to the clichés associating love with youth and thus limiting the concept of beauty to the approximation of adolescent shapes and proportions. In a society where the average age is continuously increasing, Bradt claims, through his art, the right to love, to sensuality and sexuality, to feelings and relationships, for all people, regardless of maturity and physical appearances.
The artist uses, in his group portraits (as in the work “Hoffnung”/”Hope”), the foreground characters both as “descriptive pillars” and as introductory elements in the imaginary discourse, which continues in the second plans. Thus, the viewer perceives the scene as a story, a narrative act in images, leaving room for multiple levels of interpretation.
The “sacred-profane” antithesis from the “12” series, the autobiographical confession from “The Struggle of Strength. Suffering”, the characters turned towards the background are elements that intimately connect the viewer to Bradt’s works, often to the point of identification.
Artist
Bruno Maria Bradt
Bruno Maria Bradt was born in Timișoara in 1962. He starts drawing as a small child and attends the local art high school. Before graduating, he received the First Prize of the National Drawing Contest. Bradt studied art at the “Ion Andreescu” Institute of Arts in Cluj-Napoca. In 1984 he settled in Germany, in Fürth, where he studied graphic design at the Academy of Arts in Nuremberg.
Bradt worked for decades as a graphic designer for several companies, then as an art director for advertising agencies. Fifteen years ago, Bruno Maria Bradt made the decision to become freelancer and to dedicate his time mainly to his art, specializing in an extremely complex artistic technique, with very few contemporary representatives: the monumental drawing. His technique is that of the classic drawing, of Renaissance origin, but his themes are very modern, and the composition usually includes multiple representations of the key characters in a single work.
With numerous awards and recognitions in just a few years, Bradt reveals drawing to viewers as a shared language of expression, managing to convey nuanced emotions and – above all, as the artist likes to say, “stories”. Bruno Maria Bradt’s works are elaborate studies of narrative composition, communicating ideas and feelings, in which the vitality of the characters is remarkable. Marked by important symbols, defining the characters they complement, his works stand out for their complexity and suggestive power.
Bradt draws with pencil on gray binding board. Color accents are set with acrylic paint or gouache and pastel chalk. Among his themes we find family, faith, but also social issues such as acceptance, old age, pain and distress, illness. Bradt always draws his characters with dignity and respect for their story. Messages in the form of selected texts, written in his drawings, are used by Bradt to emphasize his pictorial statement and thus create new connections.
Known especially in southern Germany, where he exhibited in museums, galleries, but also in cathedrals and churches, Bradt is a member of several prestigious professional associations. In Romania, he has been present in recent years with personal exhibitions at the National Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca (“Homo Sum” solo show, accompanied by a catalogue published by the “Tribuna” Publishing House, 2020), at the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu (2021), at the “Mansarda” Gallery of the UdV Timisoara Faculty of Arts (“Memory of the Passage” solo show, accompanied by a catalogue, 2021) and was one of invited artists of the Brasov International Biennale of Visual Arts, 2nd edition (“Alpha and Omega”, at the “Casa Muresenilor” Museum, 2021).
Curator
Cristina Simion
Curator and gallerist Cristina Simion has designed and curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, especially of contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, with focus on Romania, in Nuremberg, Munich, Paris, Berlin, Bayreuth (Germany), Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu, Iasi, Brasov (Romania), Rome, Civitella d’Agliano (Italy), Ljubljana, Bled (Slovenia), Brussels (Belgium), Schmerikon (Switzerland), Chișinău (Modova). She has been co-curator of the International Biennale of Visual Arts in Brașov, in 2019 and 2021.
With a special interest in the new figurative art, she wrote, edited and coordinated art catalogues and albums and published articles in various cultural magazines, in English and Romanian.
She has been based in Nuremberg, Germany, since 2012, where she runs the Tiny Griffon Gallery. With a PhD in change management in non-standardized industries and more than two decades of previous experience in media management, journalism and communication, Cristina Simion is a graduate of the International Curatorial Course organized by NODE Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin (2018-2019) and of the Art Collections Management Course of the same institution (2022). She graduated from the Introduction to Art and Finance course of the Sotheby’s Institute of Arts New York (2022). She lectured in art management at Civitella d’Agliano international art camp, at Horasis Global Meeting, at the West University Timisoara and Transilvania University Brasov. In 2022, she took part in the international programme “Artists at Risk”, art residencies for artists from the Ukraine.