Peintre Plasticien

CLARKE Bruce

Bruce Clarke was born in 1959 in London to South African expatriate parents. He became politically and artistically involved very early on in the struggle against Apartheid and closely followed the rising tensions in Rwanda.

He was introduced to the Art & Language movement and conceptual art at Leeds University in the 1980s.

His work deals with contemporary history, the writing and transmission of this history to stimulate reflection on the contemporary world and its representations. Firmly anchored in a current of critical figuration, his plastic research integrates the codes to better turn them against the devices of power and injustice.

His latest publication, Ghosts of the Sea (2016), pays tribute to the refugees who are victims of trans-Mediterranean human trafficking.

Rwanda

Le Jardin de la Mémoire

Encouraged by Rwandan friends in exile in France, he went to Rwanda in 1994 for a photographic report, a few weeks after the genocide. Clarke is shaken by the reality of the massacre and wonders about his role as an artist.

On a site near Kigali, he proposed to design an artistic memorial, a monumental installation dedicated to the disappeared. This Garden of Memory includes the installation of one million stones, each bearing the name of a victim of the genocide.

Carried out with the help of victims' associations, families, the Rwandan government and UNESCO, the project was completed in 2019.

Without Art, we wouldn't be human.
The very basic definition of what humanity is, what being human is, is that humans got language and culture.
Otherwise, we're animals. Literally.

Bruce Clarke, 2021

Procédé artistique

Jouer avec les fragments

According to Bruce Clarke, the history comes to us in fragments that we have to reconstitute.
It is by applying this method of thought that he works.

Clarke creates from fragments. Diaries, posters, scraps of words and colors; all these individual pieces are integrated on the canvas and reorganized.

They form a new composition with multiplied meanings. Buried underneath these fragments, the story can be guessed.

Toiles animales

Les Prédateurs

These paintings are the result of Bruce Clarke's reflection on the notion of predation.

In this series of paintings the animal is only a metaphor. The subject, as always with Bruce Clarke, is the human. The human predation.
Because in spite of his strong capacity of empathy, even sometimes of sympathy, the Man is also one of the only living beings which hunts his own species, well beyond the simple survival.

Human predation is financial, sexual and environmental. We also speak of social or ecological predation; in short, predation in all fields!