Born and currently working in Richmond VA, Bruce Wilhelm earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2004 and his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. He has been exhibited in galleries and art fairs from coast to coast over the last ten years, and was most recently featured in the Untitled Art Fair Miami in December of 2017. His solo exhibitions include NEXT and Paintings/Props/Intermediaries at ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA), Humor Me at Mulherin+Pollard (New York, NY), and Friends of Painting at Eleanor Harwood Gallery (San Francisco, CA). Wilhelm’s work has also been in group shows with ADA Gallery, Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia, PA), Fort Worth Drawing Center (Fort Worth, TX), Nudashank (Baltimore, MD), and Projekt722 (Brooklyn, NY).
A two-time recipient of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship for painting in 2004 and 2006, Wilhelm has also been awarded with the Pew Wish List Award and the Trawich Prize, and he is a Fallon and Rosof JC Reynal Finalist. He is also the cofounder of the artist collective Grizzly Grizzly, which began in 2009 as a space for innovative work without the constraints of institutional agendas or commercial interests.
Wilhelm’s most recent five-foot abstract canvases embody new experiments in play and playfulness, as he explains, “the arts’ most important contribution since the renaissance is its openness, its exploration, its counter-culture—its non-compliance. I embrace this. I’m a painter, but I’m here to explore painting and what it means to be a painter in 2018.” Range and playfulness are apparent in these pieces, but so is a sense of structured deliberateness; these explorations work to establish an intimate relationship with the medium and the world they inhabit.
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