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Marcie Vesel Bronkar was born and raised in New York City. She has lived on both the West and East Coast throughout her life. Her training and passion in the decorative arts lead to a long career in the home furnishing industry as a Design Director, Colorist and Founder of her fabric company HOME COUTURE. Bronkar’s textiles are in the permanent collection of The Cooper Hewitt in NYC and Textile Museum in DC. Finding that painting and drawing was her voice early as a child, she succeeded in a career that allowed her to retain creative control in all aesthetic choices. “It was always about the painting; the process of getting there.”
I find as a modernist in painting that every color holds their load in the composition. My work has always been an extension of how I view the things around me. The negative and positive space; the play of forms are moving and resting against the light. As a painter I find I am passionate about color and the way it makes us feel. Color creates perspective to me: veils and layer upon layer of hues; the personality of each color and stroke.
Abstraction is the most challenging allowing the painting to be more important than the idea.
WHAT REMAINS marks a decisive turning point in Bronkar’s career. After decades as an abstract
expressionist and color field painter, she presents a solo show featuring encaustic combined-
media assemblages. These works distill a lifetime of discipline in both painting and textile design
into forms that belong fully to neither.
These pieces explore what survives when materials are
pushed beyond comfort, layered, and broken down. What emerges is not perfection but
something more honest: beauty that arrives only when destruction is allowed to complete itself.
Isolating what matters, what remains.
Color has always been the inspiration in Marcie’s work. Of recent years living in an urban landscape consumed with visual media noise.. she found herself back to her original default color… Payne’s Gray. Concrete, silver skies, steel and metallic pavement cracks.
Nothing can be missed when veils of color result in variations on a theme of a singular color. Texture, shapes, dimension… a dialogue on the edge of the paper.
“ Experimenting with cloth, pulp and fibers using encaustic as my medium grew into my new work– “what remains… beneath the surface.” How deep can the surface go and what remains unquestioned, and unnoticed…. I refer to it as deconstructed beauty … “
Ksenia Nouril, PhD, Gallery Director and Curator, The Art Students League of New York, says of Bronkar’s work:
“Welcome to the tour deforce that is the art of Marcie Vesel Bronkar. In the expansive, kaleidoscopic presentation of color and pattern, Bronkar plays with rhythms, creating a veritable symphony not only for the eyes but for the heart and mind. Together, they are a definitive statement on abstraction today.”
Review on Hanging Papers Substack by Jonathan Miller Spies
excerpt from the article:
Marcie Vesel Bronkar: See Enclosed.
Works in wax, paint, and cloth at Prince Street Gallery this September.
We have mostly letters. The Renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna wrote passionately to her friends and family—Michelangelo was among her closest epistolary companion—and among the struggles they describe was her discomfiture with publication.1 While poetry, like painting, has an implicit quality of public disclosure, in the day it was a much more private affair. Paintings were for the ceilings of churches, but poetry—the humanist, emotional, mnemosynic verse that Colonna practiced—was for letters, manuscripts, and private recitation. As the printing press—and pirated literature—proliferated, poets like Vittoria feared losing control of their work to the world2 while her Michelangelo strained for as grand an audience he could muster.
I first encountered Marcie Vesel Bronkar’s work in a more Michelangesque mode: from textile design to abstract expressionism, her work was color, form, texture, an design—at volume. A contemporary artist from New York and Los Angeles, Bronkar has moved, recently, to the mode of poetry. Possibly quieter: the works are intimately scaled and cleave toward monochrome—but more integrally, they bespeak a closeness than feels unpublishable—a letter just for us.
read the full article here
Email Artist Marcie Bronkar
Please view the Artist’s Website at marciebronkarart.com/