Virginia Bridge, ‘Opus 2405’

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Bridge is a queer visual artist, for whom geometric abstraction is a socio-political praxis.

Through a reiterative, queered deployment of an outmoded, mid century, white male aesthetic, Bridge finds a contemporary relevance for formalist art as a tool of resistance. While the notion of a utopian universal visual language may well be consigned to history, abstraction maintains its power as a disruption to the normative or expected. For Bridge this renders it a viable and relevant mode of expression. Rather than using literal, figurative or representative forms to challenge the social structures that serve to erase, confine, alienate and marginalise or to express the emotional scarring of shame and anger, Bridge finds her voice in the openness, richness and ambivalence of formalist geometric abstraction; a mode of visual poetry that enables an open-ended provocation, inviting scrutiny, yet evading the viewer's attempts to categorise or assimilate.

Hard-edge, mechanical forms are imbued with haptic, visceral qualities; Bridge’s subjective hand is evident in brush strokes or hand drawn patterns, the textural quality of uneven, over-painted surfaces and imperfect edges. Occupying a space of indeterminacy, the interaction of forms, fields of colour and edges within Bridge's work cross boundaries and disrupt binaries, exploring and settling in the interplay between harmony and tension, balance and imbalance, perfection and imperfection, masculine and feminine, objectivity and subjectivity. While the formalist elements of her work estrange the viewer from the recognisable, eluding signification and interpretation, its affective, sensual characteristics invite connection through a haptic experience.

BIOGRAPHY:

Bridge graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1981, with a degree in Music with Fine Art, and the University of the West of England in 2019 ,with an MA (Distinction) in Multidisciplinary Printmaking.

She has exhibited widely across the UK, including the RWA, where she won the Evolver Prize, the Wells Contemporary, The Hepworth Wakefield, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, David Simon Contemporary, Tarpey Gallery and The Affordable Art Fair.

She is represented by Agora Contemporary and The Drugstore Gallery.