{{Short description|American painter and sculptor}} {{Infobox artist | name = Bruno Fonseca | image = Bruno Fonseca.jpg | caption = Bruno Fonseca, 1989 (from "Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting") | birth_name = | birth_date = 1958 | birth_place = New York City, U.S. | death_date = {{death date and age|1994|5|31|1958}} | death_place = East Hampton, New York, U.S. | field = Painting, Sculpture | training = | movement = Abstract, figurative | works = ''The War Murals'' | father = Gonzalo Fonseca | relatives = Caio Fonseca (brother)<br />Isabel Fonseca (sister) <br />Quina Fonseca (sister) }} '''Bruno Fonseca''' (1958 – May 31, 1994) was an American artist who shifted between abstract and figurative styles and worked in both painting and sculpture.<ref name=NYT>{{cite news|title=Bruno Fonseca, 36, Painter and Sculptor|work=The New York Times|date=1994-06-03|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/03/obituaries/bruno-fonseca-36-painter-and-sculptor.html}}</ref>
== Biography ==
=== Early life === Fonseca was born in New York to a family of artists. His father, Gonzalo Fonseca, was an Uruguayan sculptor. His younger brother Caio Fonseca is a well known contemporary painter. His sister Isabel Fonseca is a writer. Fonseca had dyslexia and a stutter, conditions so severe as a child he was treated by a psychiatrist.<ref name=Brother>{{cite news|author=Isabel Fonseca|title=Dear Brother|work=The Guardian|date=2000-11-04|url=https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2000/nov/04/weekend7.weekend2}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|title=A Remembrance of Bruno Fonseca|publisher=The Charlie Rose Show|date=2000-11-23|url=http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2000/11/23/2/a-remembrance-of-bruno-fonseca|url-status=dead|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20080514191137/http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2000/11/23/2/a-remembrance-of-bruno-fonseca|archivedate=2008-05-14}}</ref> Fonseca was able to compensate for his verbal difficulties with a tremendous visual fluency, reproducing paintings by Michelangelo and other Great Masters at an early age.<ref name=Brother/> Raised in a house on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, Fonseca studied at the Dalton School in Manhattan and St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights. Fonseca failed to graduate from high school<ref>Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting, p. 21</ref> and at age 18, he moved to Barcelona, where he studied with Augusto Torres. Fonseca lived in Barcelona until 1993, when he returned to New York a few months before his death.
Fonseca had what his sister called "a slightly perverse anti-taste for exquisite goods and 'luxuries' of all kinds."<ref name=Brother/> He preferred old objects, old clothes and junk that he collected from the streets of Barcelona. He chose to live in Barcelona's red-light district, among the city's poor, cripples, addicts, street girls, and bohemians.<ref>{{cite book|author1=Alan Jenkins |author2=Karen Wilkin |author3=Isabel Fonseca |title=Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting, pp. 7-9|publisher=Abbeville Press|year=2000|isbn=0-7892-0626-9}}</ref>
=== Career === Late in his life, Fonseca painted four large paintings known as "The War Murals" depicting scenes of warfare. The individual works are titled ''Tank'' (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 269.2 cm) ''Fire'' (oil on canvas, 207 x 284.5 cm), ''Bucharest'' (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 279.4 cm), and ''Timișoara''<ref>Timișoara is the city where the anti-Ceauşescu revolution began in 1989.</ref> (oil on canvas, 210.8 x 271.7 cm). One writer described the anti-war theme in "The War Murals", begun in 1989 and finished in 1993, as "the most powerful statement of their kind since Picasso's great ''Guernica''."<ref>Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting, p. 198 "Together they constitute a remarkable work, the more remarkable (given the larger scale) in that the painter was, as he worked on them, already suffering from the illness that would kill him. ... I think them the most powerful statement of their kind since Picasso's great ''Guernica''."</ref> The murals were inspired by images of boy soldiers torn from the newspaper and by images of violence in Eastern Europe, including the public execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.<ref name=Brother/><ref>Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting, pp. 191-204</ref> His sister recalled watching scenes of the upheavals in Eastern Europe on CNN with Bruno and wrote: "The War Murals - Bruno's four larger narrative paintings inspired by the anti-communist upheavals - represent his greatest synthesis of abstract and representational painting, something he had struggled for throughout his working life."<ref name=Brother/> Fonseca worked on the murals for several years, finishing them while he was suffering from the effects of AIDS.<ref name=Brother/> A public showing of "The War Murals" was the opening exhibition for the John McEnroe Gallery in SoHo in January 1994. Fonseca also had a solo show at New York's Salander-O'Reilly in 1993.<ref>{{cite news|author=Robert G. Edelman|title=Review of exhibitions: Bruno Fonseca|publisher=Art in America|date=February 1994}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|author=Gerrit Henry|title=Reviews: Bruno Fonseca|publisher=ARTnews|date=December 1993}}</ref>
After contracting AIDS, Fonseca returned to New York. He married his pupil, German painter Anke Blaue, shortly before his death. He died of AIDS in 1994 at age 36.<ref name=NYT/>
==Notes== {{Reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Fonseca, Bruno}} Category:1958 births Category:1994 deaths Category:American contemporary painters Category:20th-century American painters Category:American male painters Category:People of the Romanian revolution Category:American war artists Category:AIDS-related deaths in New York (state) Category:Artists from East Hampton (town), New York Category:American people of Uruguayan descent Category:Artists from Manhattan Category:People from Greenwich Village Category:Dalton School alumni Category:Saint Ann's School (Brooklyn) alumni Category:Hispanic and Latino American artists Category:20th-century American male artists