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