Rooted in painting but also including sculpture, print and installation, Bruno’s practice examines the systems of representation that have shaped Western art history – from religious iconography to landscape painting and modernist formalism. Her work tracks the persistence of something unique in transient historical forms, reducing symbols and allegories to their elemental expressions as physical gestures and linguistic signs. Through analysis, citation, and decontextualisation, Bruno’s compositions reveal presence in otherwise void spaces, conjuring spectral forms and elusive imagery that question conditions of presence and absence in visual representation.
At the core of her practice is a materially driven approach to painting. Through a prolonged process of layering, Bruno buries images beneath successive strata of gesso, composing works that function as both surfaces and sites of sedimentation. Referencing art historical images that are at times copied and enclosed within the materiality of paint, her work operates across multiple temporalities: the time of making, the historical time embedded within referenced images, and the time of gestures that reveal or obscure them through erasure and excavation.
This quasi-archaeological process recalls the notion of pentimento, where hidden changes gradually re-emerge. Revealing ghostly forms and latent images, Bruno’s work produces unstable, layered compositions that resist fixed interpretation, foregrounding painting as a dynamic site of memory, transformation, and recomposed temporality.
Clémentine Bruno (b. 1994, Paris, FR) lives and works between London and Paris. She received her MFA in Painting at UCL Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019, after completing a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2018.
Solo and duo exhibitions include NıCOLETTı, London, UK (2027 – forthcoming); Tabula Rasa Gallery, Beijing, CN (2025); Tonus, Paris, FR (2024); one gee in fog, Geneva, CH (2024); Chapter NY, New York, USA (duo exhibition with Adam Gordon, 2021); and Project Native Informant, London, UK (2020).
She has been included in group exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels, BE (2025); Balice Hertling, Paris, FR (2024); Baleno International, Rome, IT (2023); Tabula Rasa, Beijing, CN (2023); Project Native Informant, London, UK (2023); Halle Nord, Geneva, CH (2023); NıCOLETTı, London, UK (2022); Sans Titre, Paris, FR (2021); Bambi Woods Presents, ERGO, Athens, GR (2021); and Stoppenbach & Delestre, London, UK (2020). Her work has also been shown at Liste Art Fair (solo, 2026); Frieze London (solo, 2022); Paris Internationale (solo, 2022); and Art Basel Miami Beach (2020), among other international art fairs.
