Roser Bru
Barcelona (Spain) 1923 - Santiago de Chile (Chile) 2021.
Chilean painter and printmaker born in Barcelona, Spain in 1923. Her life and work remain marked by the period between wars, exile and her two homelands, Spain and Chile. With just one year old she moved with her parents to Paris where she lived for four years during her first exile during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera.
Later, her family returned to Barcelona, the city where she entered the Montessori School. In 1931, she began her studies at the Institute-School of the Generalitat, in the same city. In 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, she went into exile again. She traveled to France, where she embarked on the ship Winnipeg, arriving in Chile on September 1, as World War II began in Europe. That same year she entered the School of Fine Arts in Santiago, where she carried out free studies until 1942 and received the teachings of the Chilean painters Pablo Burchard and Israel Roa.
In the beginning, Roser Bru's work has encompassed painting, drawing and engraving. Her work was characterized by a closeness to the material influenced by Catalan informalism. At the end of the 60s she painted and drew bodies and faces inspired by her motherhood and focusing on the figure of women. Her bodies of work where language and the use of photography are intertwined are closer to the conceptualisms of the Escena Avanzada and artists such as Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago de Chile, 1943).
In 2017, she participated in the group exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960 – 1985, organized by the Hammer Museum, UCLA, California, United States (2017).Galeria Memoria, dedicated the exhibition Lives in Transit to her; Tribute to Roser Bru in 2021. This posthumous tribute was the first individual exhibition dedicated to the artist in Madrid since 1976 and had the official support of the Roser Bru Foundation.
Her work is part of important public and private collections, including: Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York, USA; Brookylin Museum, New York, USA; Art Museum of Americas, Washington D.C. USA; Rio de Janeiro Museum of Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; National Museum of Fine Arts of Chile, Santiago de Chile, Chile; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile, Santiago de Chile; Chili. Since 2020 she has been part of the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía with her graphic series Made in Spain (1966)
