Karin Bruckner

I had a ‘tree buddy’ in New York’s Riverside Park - it was a role model, a tree of life of sorts. Broken, bent and blown sideways it continued to bloom and thrive year after year. By the power of art, I do the same. My art is a means to handle life; once handed to me in shards and fragments without a fixed framework and all but uncertainty as to whether any of the accumulated detritus was worth keeping.

Over a lifetime I figured out how to put the pieces together into a whole that made sense and lent beauty to the brokenness. Making my art has taught me how to live my life and inspire others to do the same. There is joy born of darkness and a desire to, if not, make the world a better place, then at least shine a light into my corner of the Universe. My process nods, often quite literally, to the Japanese concept of ‘Kintsugi’ in which cracks and fissures are celebrated by the application of gold.

The themes of losing and finding, reappropriating and inventing apply to much of my work. Many pieces involve circles as a metaphor for the cycle of life and everything beginning anew. There is an underlying concern and running commentary on current events that subtly weaves through my work and often reveals itself in the titles. I am exploring parameters of rising to our full potential, emerging and prevailing in joy and power with the promise of permission to be bigger than what we allow ourselves to be. I am investigating ways of breaking the boundaries of the structural forms that contain and restrain us. In our challenging state of affairs we could, yet again, feel called upon to reinvent and heal ourselves, awaken to new possibilities, pick up the pieces and build anew. To that end, Fluorescents have crept into my palette : alarming times call for alarming colors. I prefer looking at problems as opportunities, without problems we wouldn’t look for solutions. Printmaking has been a crucial teacher in that regard.

Born in Switzerland, Karin Bruckner was educated in Switzerland, Germany and the United States. She holds a Master’s Degree in Architecture from the Technical University in Munich and a Masters of Science in Architecture and Building Design from Columbia University in New York.

Bruckner came to Printmaking through Architecture after working in the offices of Richard Meier & Partners and Philip Johnson Architects. Due to a structure not unlike Architecture's layers in space, Printmaking offered a unique way of re-connecting Bruckner to her life-long passion of creating Art. Printmaking carries with it the element of surprise and the inevitability of the “happy accident” which the artist credits for immensely expanding her artistic sensibilities. The work evolves and resides in the space created by Pull and Push. Over the years, constant experimentation has propelled Bruckner’s unique twodimensional works on paper into the third dimension. Her work is process driven, responding to the materials and techniques at hand, resulting in a widely varied yet distinctive portfolio. It led Bruckner to a consummate Work on Paper practice that encompasses repurposing and engages paper spatially- from small intimate works to larger scale explorations. Karin achieves thoroughly embedded and complexly layered visual landscapes of considerable depth. She has exhibited and sold her work worldwide and is part of numerous private and public collections.

Karin Bruckner is a represented artist with Susan Eley Fine Art and Carter Burden Gallery as well as a Teaching Artist for Printmaking at Carter Burden Network in New York