Otto Breicha

1998

A visit to the Salzburg Summer Academy a good 15 years ago gave her a taste for painting and solidified her decision to live for and from painting from then on. She was soon taught what she needed to learn at the Vienna Academy. Despite everything else that has been thrown at her, family and otherwise, she paints stubbornly and uninterruptedly. Only sometimes people. And then especially those she knows well (like her daughter Anna). But she prefers things, banal objects from her everyday life, which she comes across as if by chance (but perhaps not just by chance!). Nothing that imposes itself in particular, but rather objective situations for which she can take her time. For example, a jacket hanging on the back of an armchair or a tuft of primer brushes, old-fashioned (and therefore exquisitely beautiful) toys and shoes lying around. She buys small items from junk dealers, which then appear large in her pictures: a monumentalized tin box, packing crates or a dress doll. Brigitte Bruckner is a born still life painter.

If you question her persistently, she admits that she is somehow concerned with the so-called essence of things. Not only, but above all. The certain state of affairs that plays such an important role in her pictures gives the objects she depicts a strange, "lonely" (as she says) aura and oddities. Still-life specialists (such as Morandi, for example) insist on that fluidity, which, as in her pictures, can be sensed better than just well. But it is precisely this that makes the quiet occupation of still life painting appear to be essentially hard and responsibly strenuous work. But the still life painter Brigitte Bruckner does not make a big or even loud fuss about it. A few little things are enough for her to make ends meet. Only a few dear things are dearest to her, and she is as unwavering and stubborn about them as a seasoned still life artist should be.