Lucia Bru

For more than three decades, Lucia Bru has developed a body of sculptural work rooted in the patient exploration of material, form, and perception. Born in Brussels in 1970, the artist works with paper, crystal, porcelain, cement, and plaster, allowing each material to reveal its own logic, fragility, and resistance.

Her practice is shaped by a subtle tension between geometric precision and the unpredictability of process. Cubes, cages, grids, right angles, and mirrored surfaces recur throughout her work as structures of both order and openness. Often restrained in appearance yet complex in their making, these forms emerge from a continuous dialogue between intention and accident, between the artist’s gesture and the material’s response.

At the heart of Bru’s work lies an attentiveness to matter as a living field of transformation. Rather than imposing a fixed form, she allows uncertainty and chance to enter the process. Sculpture becomes a place of negotiation with a mineral world marked by memory, pressure, and time. Within this rigorous formal language, her works evoke organic, animal, and human resonances, suggesting the quiet presence of bodies, traces, and inner structures.

Drawing, photography, and video form an essential part of Bru’s practice. Through these media, she observes fleeting phenomena: reflections, folds, shadows, hollows, tensions, and subtle shifts of light. They extend her sculptural thinking into the realm of perception, revealing the spatial and poetic dimensions of what might otherwise remain almost invisible.

Since the beginning of her career, Bru has carefully preserved her studies, fragments, and material experiments, gradually building a physical archive of her practice. This collection of trials and residues, at once methodical and intuitive, offers insight into the continuity of her research and the transformations that have shaped it over time. Presented together, these works recall the status and intimacy of Eva Hesse’s Test Pieces, while opening a retrospective and forward-looking reading of Bru’s oeuvre.

Published by Mercatorfonds on the occasion of Lucia Bru’s exhibition at MAC’S Grand-Hornu, this bilingual monograph brings together contributions by Denis Gielen and Qilan Shen, with a preface by artist Michel François. Richly illustrated with more than one hundred images across 160 pages, the publication offers a profound insight into the material, spatial, and perceptual dimensions of Bru’s work.

Lucia Bru’s exhibition at MAC’S, Grand-Hornu, Belgium, is on view from June 14 until November 1, 2026.