DAN BRUGGEMAN CURIO
December 7, 2024 - January 11, 2025
DAN BRUGGEMAN
Nebraska native Dan Bruggeman is a retired educator from Carleton College. During his 30-year art 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. Dan’s paintings reveal the sometimes odd intersection between manmade structures and nature.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In this exhibit, I continue my exploration into the visual potential of our northern Midwestern landscape, a place where vast woods meet open meadows on one side and an endless body of water on the other. This is a subject that, for me, stimulates the imagination and offers endless visual and narrative possibility.
As the work in this exhibit evolved, a theme emerged, perhaps unintentionally: the familiar has become unfamiliar. Suspended between land, water and sky and maybe life and death, a toy-like truck removes an entire swath of forest on its flat-bed trailer; a red sweater has somehow been abandoned on a wintry lifeguard’s chair long after summer; mounted specimens of extinct birds reanimate the habitat where they have long been absent.
Dreamlike, these arboreal scenes evoke a place in nature one might have experienced, but now take on an aura of uncertainty. Like a stage setting, we can only imagine the events and actors that generated these uncanny dramas.
Traveling northward from my home in Saint Paul, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the place and landscape we all share. I am reminded of what might have similarly compelled artists like Pieter Brueghel and Martin Johnson Heade to paint their allegorical, evocative and somewhat speculative scenes. These tiny vignettes might be playful if not for the suggestion of an uncertain future. But still, in the midst of this void, they offer hope of what once existed may live on.
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Dan Bruggeman, 2024
Shelter (Study) 2024 | watercolor & gouache | $2,600. image: 24 x 20" | frame: 31 x 26"
The Perfect Shape of Our Absence (East)
2024 | acrylic on linen | $6,500. image: 48 x 48" | frame: 52 x 52"
Graft (Cages)
2024 | acrylic on linen | $5,500. image: 36 x 36" | frame: 38 x 38"
US-13 (Merry-go-Round)
2024 | watercolor | $2,500. image: 20 x 20" | frame: 26 x 26"
Some Thoughts on Taxidermy 2024 | watercolor & gouache | $3,000. image: 30 x 22" | frame: 36 x 30"
Its Going Was Always Imminent (Passenger Pigeon)
2024 | acrylic on linen | $5,500. image: 40 x 30" | frame: 42 x 32"
(Ivory
2024 | mixed media | $1,200. image: 14 x 11" | frame: 19 x 16"
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Graft
Billed Woodpecker)
(Clutch) 2024 | mixed media | $1,200. image: 14 x 11" | frame: 19 x 16"
Graft
Graft (Shelter) 2024 | mixed media | $1,200. image: 14 x 11" | frame: 19 x 16"
Of Summer Weight Sweaters 2024 | acrylic on linen| $5,500. image: 40 x 30" | frame: 42 x 32"
Its Going Was Always Imminent (Ivory Billed Woodpecker) 2024 | acrylic on linen | $5,500. image: 36 x 36" | frame: 38 x 38"
Dwelling (One and Two)
2024 | acrylic on linen | $5,500. image: 36 x 36" | frame: 38 x 38"
US-13 (Brule River)
2024 | acrylic on linen | $5,500. image: 36 x 36" | frame: 38 x 38"
US-13 (Six Red Swings, Minus One)
2024 | watercolor | $2,500. image: 20 x 20" | frame: 26 x 26"
US-13 (Foul Pole, Broken)
2024 | watercolor | $2,500. image: 20 x 20" | frame: 26 x 26"
US-13 (Brule River) Study
2024 | watercolor | $2,500. image: 19 x 19" | frame: 24 x 24"
US-13 (Forest)
2024 | watercolor & gouache | $2,500. image: 20 x 20" | frame: 26 x 26"
The Perfect Shape of Our Absence (East) Study 2024 | watercolor & gouache | $2,800. image: 28 x 21" | frame: 34 x 27"
