18 October - 6 November 2012
about the exhibition
Bruno Leti has led a diverse and fertile art practice for over forty years. The extraordinary depth of this practice is revealed in his ability to engage with masterly technique across a variety of mediums from printmaking, paintings, monotypes, books and photography. However, it is the emotive response that Bruno is able to elicit from the viewer which cements his strength across these mediums. In a foreword to Sasha Grishin’s recent publication, ‘Bruno Leti: Portrait of a Printmaker’, Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, remarks that Bruno is “a highly intuitive artist, responding to his environment with works that are imbued with luminosity and timelessness”. This exhibition ‘Gesture and time’, conveys Bruno’s desire to capture those transient moments in time and place that are otherwise limited by rational thought. It is through the physical act of gestural mark making that Bruno is able to communicate this while also expressing his emotional response to the land around him. His work is sometimes referred to as autobiographical, yet the work “does not reflect the external circumstances of his life, but rather an internal spiritual growth”, notes art critic Sasha Grishin. Translating the language of abstraction is not always straightforward as the pictorial space is used as a conduit to convey and help us connect with a greater emotional landscape – Bruno’s and our own.
Bruno Leti was born in Italy and emigrated to Australia with his family as a child in 1952. Taking art history studies at the University of Melbourne as well as a course at the Melbourne Teachers’ College, Bruno was trained for a career which would weave education, art practice and workshops for printmakers. In the late 1970s he undertook a number of commissions for the Print Council of Australia and, preceding a residency at Grafica Uno in Milan in 1982, Bruno studied under Tate Adams at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 2001, he was awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (New York) and, in 2006, the State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship. Bruno’s work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, all state art galleries as well as, Parliament House, Artbank, BHP, Phillip Morris, Westpac, The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Biblioteca Comunale in Milan amongst many others.This is Bruno’s first exhibition with Beaver Galleries.
