“Mark Brusse: Les nuages habités” Installation view at Gallery 508 ©Gallery 508Gallery 508 presents “Mark Brusse: Les nuages habités” through February 29. This is Korea’s first solo exhibition which showcases recent two-dimensional works by Mark Brusse in 25 years after his participation in the 1998 Buyeo Sculpture Symposium.
A sculptor, painter, and installation artist, Mark Brusse was a key member of Nouveau Réalisme, a French avant-garde art movement, in the 1960s, interested in the ephemerality and eventuality of his work. His interest in the Orient has led him to live in Korea and Japan, and he has traveled the world to experience different cultures, representing these experiences into his work through various genres such as assemblage, collage, ceramics, and painting.
Mark Brusse’s paintings in this exhibition are characterized using dry pastels on water-fed canvases to make a smudging effect of color, applying a tempera technique inspired by ancient murals. His paintings have a dreamlike atmosphere, like fairy tale images floating among the clouds. In this exhibition, you can see the artist’s emotional two-dimensional works, which are different from his avant-garde object sculptures made by synthesizing waste materials.
Mark Brusse was born in 1937 in Alkmaar, a small town in the Netherlands. After studying at the School of Fine Arts of Arnhem in the Netherlands, he moved to Paris, where he began working with wooden objects. He joined the French avant-garde art movement Nouveau Réalisme, led by the critic Pierre L’estany, and participated in the 2nd Paris Biennale. After traveling to Mexico and the United States, he became involved with the Fluxus group, showcasing performance art on the street and collaborating with avant-garde musician John Cage. In the 1970s, he immersed himself in environmental art, working in assemblage with discarded objects. In the 1980s, he opened his eyes to painting and showed his outstanding talent as a painter by producing various flat works with emotional colors. In 1988, he spent six months in Seoul for a large-scale sculpture installation at the Olympic Park. His paintings were rediscovered when the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation donated a large collection of them to the Centre Pompidou.
