Initially rooted in painting, Clémentine Bruno’s practice engages with dominant art historical and institutional modes of representation. Her work investigates how singular forms persist through shifting historical frameworks and social structures. Drawing on literature and cinema, Bruno interrogates the processes of circulation of images through processes of decontextualisation, employing concepts such as signs and referential systems across painting, sculpture, print, and installation.
At the core of her practice is a materially driven approach to painting, developed 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 studied, copied, and enclosed within the material, her paintings operate 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. Subject to light, time, and environmental conditions, Bruno’s works evolve, revealing ghostly forms and latent images. In this way, her practice 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, before 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 – forthcoming); Frieze London (solo, 2022); Paris Internationale (solo, 2022); and Art Basel Miami Beach (2020), among other international art fairs.
