Lucia Bru

Over the past thirty years, Lucia Bru (1970, Brussels) has developed a sculptural practice grounded in an experimental approach to materials – paper, crystal, porcelain, cement, and plaster – in which geometry and chance converge to form structures that are at once minimal and complex. The cubes, cages, grids, squares, and even mirrors that constitute the main ‘families’ of her work emerge as the empirical outcome of deliberate interventions and the erratic reactions of the materials. Attentive to the responses of the materials she explores through a creative process open to chance, the sculptor positions herself as an interlocutor for a mineral world whose agency, memory, and surprising fluidity she acknowledges, opening it to the organic, the animal, and the human. Through drawing, photography, and video, Lucia Bru seeks to render tangible the fragile and transient presence of a breath, a reflection, a fold, a curve, a hollow, or a shadow. This same attentiveness to the sketch — vulnerable by nature — has, since her early days, led her to preserve every attempt on the shelves of her studio, gradually forming a living and vital archive of her own practice. These experimentations – as discreet as they are surprising – whose composition recalls Eva Hesse’s celebrated Test Pieces, offer both a retrospective and forward-looking view of Lucia Bru’s practice.