Fernando Bryce

  • April 5, 2016 7:00 PM

Minus the gold leaf, they function like pictures with pronounced textual elements — in other words, illustrated manuscripts for the 21st century.
Christian Viveros-Fauné, “Fernando Bryce, One-of-a Kind Copyist, On View in Chelsea,” Village Voice, December 15, 2015.

April 5 – Fernando Bryce is a New York- and Lima-based artist, renowned in his home country of Peru and recognized internationally for his “mimetic analysis,” in which he culls archives for print materials such as advertisements, newspaper articles, and propaganda pamphlets in order to faithfully reproduce a carefully chosen selection for his own ink-on-paper “reconstructions.”

Bryce’s most recent exhibition, at Alexander and Bonin in New York this past fall, addressed the discourse of universal values during the 1940s and 1950s with three major works: The Book of Needs, Arte Nuevo, and ARTnews 1944–1947. He chronicled the changing international climate at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War and surveyed media representation of the subsequent cultural shifts. Art historian Andrea Giunta writes for the exhibition, “Through his method of mimetic analysis, [Bryce] reproduces and renews the archive he has compiled around this system of representations that drew a triangle between Paris, New York and Buenos Aires. The meticulous copying of the original gives new life to the written word and to everything these texts and images condensed. . . . By bringing this archive into the present he clearly goes beyond a simple archeology of the past.”

For Tuesday Evenings, Fernando Bryce shares his scrupulous and deliberated approach to artmaking that produces such ambitious works. 

Fernando Bryce (b. 1965 Lima) currently lives and works in Lima and New York. In 2011, a major survey of his work, Drawing Modern History, was organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) and traveled to Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main, 2002; 8th International Istanbul Biennial, 2003; 26th Biennial of São Paulo, 2004; 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2005; T1: The Pantagruel Syndrome, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2006; and the 11th Biennale de Lyon, 2011.

Image credit: Fernando Bryce, ARTnews 1944–1947, 2015. Ink on paper in 31 parts. 236 7/8 x 49 1/2 inches. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

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