Eugene von Bruenchenhein: Looking Beyond the Mirror
at Phyllis Kind Gallery,
Von Bruenchenhein’s work shares much with 20th-century “high” art: a visionary near abstraction, the use of natural forms, a restless experimentation with diverse materials, the use of multiple media to create an encompassing environment (his home). But because von Bruenchenhein lived in a very different world from the one most of us inhabit and saw connections everywhere, in his oeuvre media as different as photography, painting, and sculpture don’t have the ontological differences they usually have in mainstream art. In the superb installations of Annette Messager now at the Art Institute, the photographs are clearly depictions, the plush animals actual things. Von Bruenchenhein’s kinky photographs of his wife, the sculpted ceramic crowns that seem intended for her though they’re too fragile to wear, and the tiny thronelike chairs made of chicken bones are all part of the same fantasy world. Von Bruenchenhein didn’t see the sharp boundary most of us do between symbol and actuality; a crown that Marie could actually wear–which he also made and photographed her in–was not much different, apparently, from these symbolic ones.
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My favorite works, the chicken-bone sculptures, are surprising for their perfect order. Von Bruenchenhein found matching sets of bones to create almost perfectly symmetrical miniature chairs. Small towers are constructed of one kind of bone repeated again and again, glued together in spirals. These rhythmic chairs and towers, painted in mostly bright colors with a brush that included strands of Marie’s hair, have a surprising delicacy: the bones become the skeletons of everyday forms, dematerializing them. The chair seats are full of empty spaces, and the towers spiral around an empty center.
Some of the smaller works are more unified and coherent. In Virtual Still Life #10: Nemadji Earth Pottery Framed in Candy Apple Red, abstract curved red and brown shapes in the painting mirror in a more controlled way the wildly curved streaks of red and brown on the two pots in front of it. Virtual Still Life #3: Teapot With Tempest places a painted tornado directly above a covered teapot, seeming to grow out of it. Here the artist seems to be playing, trying out different ways of connecting pot and paint, folk art and his art, the world of things and the world of paintings.
