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Bruno Mausgrad

@mausgrad

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What if attention is not primarily an act performed upon the world, but a way of becoming available to what the world gives? by @mausgrad

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25 days ago

Keeping Track I, 2026
50.7x40.7cm
Oil on panel

Keeping Track II, 2026
50.5x40cm
Oil on canvas

“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind…”
- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

The act of painting a line on a surface. The act of following a path.

Painting towards a line.

It takes time to trace it and after the path is laid out, time continues.

Layers accumulate and obscure the path, but traces of it remain visible through layers. Enough to retrace steps. And in retracing steps, every deviation, every adjustment or change, becomes a record of the attempts to keep track, rather than an image of the track.

The line is now not just a line but it’s also a history of attention, evidence of the attempts to recover the way.

Is it enough to draw a line, allow it to become obscured over time, seek for it and find it, and lose it again, and keep looking keep returning to it. Is it enough, even if only in a small way, to call what I return to, a place? Not an image of a place, but actually a place, which exists here?

There is a line. I made it. It now possesses a particular reality independent of my subsequent ability to perceive it. Every retracing therefore becomes an act of attention directed toward something real.

There are two panels seemingly showing the same line. But the paintings aren’t the track, nor images of the track. They are just evidence of my trying to remain in relation with it. The repetitions of these movements, keeping track of a line across obscuring layers, returning to it, tracing it out over time, builds the work into what might be called a history of attention, rather than an image as such. Therefore the title, ‘Keeping Track’, is a declaration that I kept track of my attempts to keep track. In this way, a line can accumulate evidence of duration.

Simone Weil describes how the act of sustaining the attention is itself meaningful, irrespective of its end:

“If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each min by @mausgrad

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a month ago

I’m so excited to announce that I’m part of Chip In ( @chipin.art ) and am exhibiting work in their second group show “Like a Kite, Without A Breeze”. Exploring the ebb and flow of an artist’s life, the exhibition invites the perspective to reconsider the everyday through the lens of embracing ambiguity, transformation and possibility.

Opening 10th - 14th September 2026 | 12-5pm
(or by appointment)
PV 12th September | 5-8pm by @mausgrad

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a month ago

Immersion (Mikvah), 2026
Oil on panel, 28.1 × 35.5 cm by @mausgrad

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2 months ago

Deskwork II, 2024-26
Oil on panel
30.8 x 40.7cm

I’ve been thinking about holding. Holding in hand, holding back, holding in attention. In my work, I’m interested in moving towards things that remain partly unknown, and in finding a way to frame one aspect of a larger, longer unfolding that necessarily eludes us. Holding becomes less a means of keeping something still than a way of staying with something while it changes, recedes or remains partly unknowable. Attention might be a way of holding what we cannot, and perhaps should not, make stay. by @mausgrad

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2 months ago

Deskwork I, 2024-26
Oil on panel
30.8 x 40.7cm

Can inattention can be part of a painting too, the things we didn’t notice, the things that went on while we were noticing something else? And what happens when these are brought into play later on? I’m fascinated by this movement between the noticed and unnoticed, and by why one thing rather than another suddenly commands our attention and seems to promise some reward for looking.

Monoprints from my old desk. Not simply a reproduction of its surface, but the moment when a series of unrelated events—scalpel cuts, collage-making, weather, neglect, relocation, my hand, chance—are made to belong to one another, are zipped together. by @mausgrad

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2 months ago

Attention for me is like a searchlight, or a stage light, that can pivot in opposite directions. It can point inside, into yourself, or it can point outside, out to the world.

A few years ago I was ill and it got stuck pointing inwards. Becoming religious was a way for me to gently prise it outwards and swivel it back to face the world. What a relief. by @mausgrad

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2 months ago

It’s the last week of ‘Floating to the Edge’, a group show with Janey George and @lucyspanyol @frankwhitstable

Thanks to everyone who’s been to the gallery to see the paintings over the summer, and to Mary Claire and the amazing team at Frank. Also big thanks to the new collectors of my work! I think there are a few paintings left so you’ve got until next week if you want one ☺️ by @mausgrad

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2 months ago

Following from the previous post…

My recent studio practice explores a tension between two different capacities in painting: painting as the exploration of a medium’s possibilities, and painting as a means of disclosing aspects of reality.
I have been thinking here with the Maharal of Prague, who understands opposing Talmudic opinions not as competing truth claims but as partial disclosures of a reality that always exceeds either formulation. By analogy, a painting need not aspire to exhaustive representation. It may instead become one material disclosure of a reality that remains richer than any single image can contain.

This has led me to ask whether a painting might begin not with invention, but with an encounter. And—thinking beyond categories of representation, figuration, abstraction—rather than representing reality from a distance (or avoiding it entirely), could painting take something more like an impression of it? Not in the optical sense of a photograph, but in the tactile sense of a relief print, where meaning arises through contact.

In The Artist’s Reality, Mark Rothko argues that “sensuality is our index to reality,” ultimately locating our sense of touch as “the final justification of our notions of reality.” For Rothko, painting is “the representation of the artist’s notion of reality in the terms of the plastic elements”: a means of reducing the complexity of experience into a material form capable of informing human sensuality. My own work begins from a similar conviction that painting can disclose reality through material form, but asks whether the painting might not simply represent an artist’s notion of reality, but allow reality itself to participate in its making. If touch is our most immediate encounter with the real, then a painting initiated through physical contact may disclose something that an invented image cannot. Its first marks are not illustrations of an idea but the residue of an encounter.

This question emerged unexpectedly through an object that has remained with me across several studios. Some years ago I was making a series of collages using cut Hebrew letters. Working directly on a wooden desk, I would cut into the pap by @mausgrad

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3 months ago

Some close ups of It Need Only Be A Tent.

This work comes from my search for a surface capable of holding paradox and opposition.

The things that really matter contain these kinds of complexity. They often exist through tensions that remain unresolved. I’m interested in whether a painting can do the same.

As part of my interrogation of representation and the image, I’m trying to push the surface into communicating different things simultaneously. Can it resemble lichen on a rock—or the veins of a leaf—while also suggesting an aerial view of a whole territory. Working at both these scales at once, a concurrence of perspective—the micro and macro. Organic forms that indicate movement—veins, capillaries, rivulets, rhizomes— can coexist with the stillness of a tablet or a stone slab.

This multiplicity extends beyond subject matter into the way the work is made. This piece combines painting and printing, intention and chance, my own hand and the action of materials. Rather than using paint simply to construct an image, I’m interested in allowing the world itself to participate in the making of the work. I’m looking for ways to get more reality into the painting.

Here, I’m following the Maharal of Prague. Explaining why the Talmud preserves opposing interpretations, he argues that they are not simply competing claims to correctness but distinct articulations of a truth that exceeds any single formulation.

“It is impossible that the truth should not possess many aspects. From each aspect the matter appears differently.”

This is not relativism. It is not the claim that every perspective is equally true. Rather, finite perspectives disclose different aspects of a truth that ultimately exceeds them. In the Maharal’s reading of Eilu v’Eilu, the opposing positions of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai are preserved because each reveals something genuine about a reality that neither can exhaust.

He therefore writes:

“Therefore it is improper, on the grounds of love of inquiry and knowledge, to dismiss anything that contradicts your view... One should not say, ‘Do not speak! Shut your mouth!’ For otherwise the true religion would not be clarified.”

I’m interested in whet by @mausgrad

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3 months ago

It Need Only Be A Tent
Oil on panel by @mausgrad

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3 months ago

Ladders of reflected light (gratitude)
Oil on panel by @mausgrad

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3 months ago