DAN BRUGGEMAN
BLUE WOOD September 12 - October 10, 2020
DAN BRUGGEMAN
Nebraska native Dan Bruggeman teaches in the fine art department at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. During his 30-year career, he has been awarded numerous grants, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, an Arts Midwest/NEA Visual Art Grant and a McKnight Foundation Grant. Throughout his career Dan has exhibited his work across the United States, including exhibitions at Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Bridgewater, Lustberg and Blumenfeld Gallery, NY, Gallery 1516, Omaha, NE.
ARTIST STATEMENT Early on, as I began preparing for this exhibit, I wandered the rural areas and urban fringes of Minnesota and Nebraska. I was trying not to think too hard about anything except to find little vignettes that, as I look at them now, appear both strange and melancholy. The paintings in this exhibit were intended to bask in the wonder of the world and nature, but they are instead stories about the balance between gravity and lightness. When I would discover a broken lawn chair, a forgotten red garment or a remote farm house, I couldn’t help but think about their history. They had belonged to someone and shared a form of human intimacy. Had they been watching, they may know more about us than we, them. Inanimate, forlorn and poetic, these objects emerged as the subject of my current work because I committed to recognizing their strangely suspended state of being. I also began to rediscover a sense of wonder in these everyday objects. Something that the philosopher Jane Bennett calls Enchantment, The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude or liveliness, a sense of having had one’s nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up and recharged – a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life. But the subject I’ve chosen, call it landscape, nature or the environment, has stopped being transcendent and has begun to feel ominous. It is freighted with baggage. Adding to their sense of abandonment, these places and objects are reminders of our limited lifespan and the challenges we face. Contemplating the brevity of life can be a dismal exercise, or it can prompt what the author WG Sebald calls a state of Melancholia, about which he says, the contemplation of the dismal plight we are in, has nothing in common with the desire to die . . . Describing the dismal plight we face contains the possibility of overcoming it. In an effort to record a representation of the natural world, it is difficult for me to ignore an awareness of man-made threats to it. Yet, along with a little enchantment, I hope that Sebald’s possibility is present in this group of paintings too. Committing to making a painting is anything but a capitulation.
-Dan Bruggeman, 2020
Winter Scene (just north of exit 84 on I35) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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and the feather drifted to earth, as if it meant something 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $4,500.00 image: 40 x 40" | frame: 45 x 45"
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and the feather drifted to earth, as if it meant something (study) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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Raft (red) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 20 x 30" | frame: 25 x 35�
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Raft (yellow) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 20 x 30" | frame: 25 x 35�
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the experience descended upon them unawares 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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Raft (blue) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 20 x 30" | frame: 25 x 35�
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Landscape Study I 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $1,050.00 image: 19 x 10" | frame: 24.5 x 15�
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they did not hear the soft, melodious notes and clicks of the wintering birds 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $4,200.00 image: 40 x 30" | frame: 45 x 35�
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Blue Wood (and then they stopped) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $4,500.00 image: 30 x 40" | frame: 35 x 45�
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we were struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the everyday 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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the gravity of a fading summer 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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the impermanence of a July evening 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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of summer-weight sweaters 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 28 x 20" | frame: 33 x 25�
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they did not hear the soft, melodious notes and quiet clicks of the wintering birds (study) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 30 x 20" | frame: 35 x 25�
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May 28th, 2020 (the lightning bugs hung in the air like a halo around her folding chair) 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $3,200.00 image: 20 x 30" | frame: 25 x 35�
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Landscape Study II 2020 | watercolor and gouache on paper $1,050.00 image: 18.5 x 7.75" | frame: 23.75 x 13�
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To purchase artwork please contact: info@grovelandgallery.com or 612-377-7800
25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis, MN 55403 www.grovelandgallery.com