New book on Kees Bruin out 15 December
25 November 2021
KEES BRUIN: VISIONS OF THE REAL
John C. Stringer + Kees Bruin
Two years after graduating, Kees Bruin was exhibiting alongside Leo Bensemann, Don Binney, Doris Lusk, Trevor Moffitt, Peter Siddell, Olivia Spencer-Bower, Grahame Sydney, Robin White, and Brent Wong.
For more than five decades of dedicated painterly practice and exhibition, Kees Bruin has established a unique visionary identity within the framework of New Zealand realism that is enthusiastically commissioned and collected internationally. His three overlapping categories: photo-realism, super-realism and what he terms “visionary-realism,” sprung from a personal search for all things truth hence his clever use of symbol, have gifted us exquisite panoramic landscapes, expressions of cultural pursuits such as surfing and skateboarding often imbued with metaphor, single and group portraits, reinterpretations of masters, especially the Dutch Golden Age, elaborate ‘still-lifes’ and works that explore elements of western Judaeo-Christian histories combined with contemporaneous fashions, settings and views to and from the earth. This personal genre launches us as art viewers into emotional odysseys of timeless human concern: Spirituality, the universe, beauty, truth, life and death, sex, betrayal, vanity and loss, as well as using paint to express beauty for its own sake.
Kees Bruin is a photo-realist artist whose paintings trade in the accuracies and ambiguities of the genre, contesting its certainties with an invitation to a more generous reality. Layered in symbolism, mythology, spirituality and the humanities, his paintings are an extraordinary perspective on the world that we all briefly occupy and call our home. — Dr Warren Feeney
Publisher: Quentin Wilson Publishing
Genre: Fine Art
ISBN: 9780995143807
Binding: Casebound
Page extent: 192
Publication Date: 15 December 2021
RRP: $75.00
Illustrations: Over 270 full colour images
Publicity: Lighthouse PR
Distributor: Nationwide
