The Chilean painter, engraver and poet of Spanish origin Roser Bru was born in 1923 in Barcelona. The following year, her family went into exile in Paris at the time of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which notably banned the Catalan language. Four years later, they returned to their hometown, where Roser studied at the Montessori school, then, in 1931, at the Generalitat Institute-School. In 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, the family returned to France, where she embarked for Chile...

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  Biography of Roser Bru

  
  The Chilean painter, engraver and poet of Spanish origin Roser Bru was born in 1923 in Barcelona. The following year, her family went into exile in Paris at the time of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which notably banned the Catalan language. Four years later, they returned to their hometown, where Roser studied at the Montessori school, then, in 1931, at the Generalitat Institute-School. In 1939, after the Spanish Civil War, the family returned to France, where she embarked for Chile with the help of the poet Pablo Neruda. She landed in Valparaiso.
  Roser Bru studied painting at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile from 1939 to 1942; a student of Pablo Burchard and Israel Roa, she studied watercolor, drawing and painting there. In 1947, she joined the Group of Plastic Students (Grupo de Estudiantes Plásticos) alongside artists such as José Balmes, Gracia Barrios, Guillermo Nuňez, Juan Egenau, and Gustavo Poblete Catalán. This group of artists introduced informalism and abstraction into Chilean art and would later be known as the "Generación del 50". In 1957, she began studying engraving at Atelier 99 (Taller 99), created and directed by Nemesio Antùnez. Influenced at the beginning (1960-1973) by Antoni Tàpies, she later took a more critical direction (1973-1988), making greater reference to social conflicts and dramatic historical events. Touched by the political events taking place in Chile and by the disappearance of those who opposed the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet, Bru began to incorporate names, numbers and identity photos into her works. Roser Bru was a professor of drawing and painting at the School of Art of the Pontifical Catholic University oof Chile from 1964 to 1968.In 1992, Roser Bru traveled to Egypt, where she discovered the funerary paintings of the Fayum mummies at the Cairo Museum, which would have a great impact on her. She composed works with triangular figures and included the theme of past and present life; she also produced new forms of portraiture.Later, in her series "Gracias a Velázquez", the artist took elements of the Spanish master such as the portraits of the "Ménines" in her own creations, focusing on the dramatic predestination of her characters, such as the dwarves of the Court.Roser Bru's work is made using different techniques of painting, drawing and engraving. She elaborates images where she includes personal, socio-political elements and references to the history of art. She mainly addresses the themes of death, of disappearance, of memory, and she systematically associates the notions of past and present.Roser Bru has exhibited in several Latin American countries and in Spain, and some of her works are preserved, among others, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago, the Chiloé Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum, the National Historical Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and the Staatliche Museen of Berlin.A true Chilean art icon, Roser Bru died in 2021, she was 98 years old.
  

  

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