Lucia Bru. To the things themselves

In about thirty years, Lucia Bru (1970, Brussels) has gradually established her sculpture by basing it on an experimental approach to materials (paper, crystal, porcelain, cement, plaster) where geometry and chance merge to give rise to structures that are both minimal and complex. The cubes, cages, grids, squares or even mirrors that constitute the main "families" are thus the empirical product of her intentional operations and the erratic reactions of the materials. Listening to the responses of the material she questions during a creative process open to hazards, the artist becomes the interlocutor of a mineral world whose agency, memory and astonishing fluidity she recognizes, and which she opens up to the organic, the animal and the human. By means of drawing, photography and video, Lucia Bru also works to make palpable the tenuous and superficial existence of a breath, a reflection, a fold, a curvature, a hollow or a shadow. Likewise, it is this acute attention paid to the sketch, vulnerable by nature, which has pushed her since her beginnings to keep on the shelves of her studio the slightest of her trials, constituting over time the living – and invigorating – archive of her own work. These experiments, as discreet as they are astonishing, whose arrangement recalls the famous Test Pieces of Eva Hesse, offer a retrospective and prospective look at Lucia Bru's approach.