Nathan Brujis: Spirituality and the Subconscious

Over 200 artists, collectors, and museum supporters celebrated the opening of the exhibition Nathan Brujis: Spirituality and the Subconscious, curated by Nancy Mantell and Susan H. Picker at the Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College in New York on January 30th.

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1971, Brujis grew up in its close-knit Jewish community. He says the time he spent in Israel as a teen and later have been important to his work as an artist, particularly the impact of Jerusalem’s archeological artifacts and the layering of history there.

When he moved to the United States for college, Brujis studied art and philosophy at Brandeis University, and in 1992 was awarded the Deborah Josepha Cohen Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting. Initially planning to study medicine, he decided to become an artist when he was a junior at Brandeis, although he had been painting all his life. His mother was a working artist in Peru and he grew up in her studio, drawing and making ceramics. Brujis obtained his master’s degree from the American University in Washington, D.C.

Later awards were the New York Studio School Faculty Award in 1994; and il Premio per la Pittura Lorenzo il Magnifico at the Florence Biennale d’Arte Contemporanea in 2001 and 2003. Nathan Brujis has exhibited extensively in Peru, Italy, and New York, where he now lives and works.

Brujis’s Jewish heritage is evident in his early work of the 1990s, seen here in Menorah, Paracas, and the New York School, Adam and Eve, and Spirit Light Through the Temple Window. He says that “Judaism has shaped me as a person. My views, thinking, and perspective come from my Jewish upbringing – my sense of the spiritual, family, traditions.”

 

In much of his work in the early 2000s through 2015, Brujis experimented by producing drawings and watercolors on paper. His paintings created since 2020 are the result of an ongoing act of discovery rather than a planned design. As he works on a painting he thinks about the space, the colors, and their reactions to each other. And so, the painting grows and becomes a whole. In paintings mirroring the power of the subconscious and the spiritual, his recent works speak to his interest in the sciences and philosophy and how they intersect with and affect art.

The January 30th opening program featured Brujis in conversation with Rabbi Sarah Berman’20 of New York’s Central Synagogue, a museum curator on the West Coast for a decade before starting her studies at HUC. Rabbi Berman began by noting that while Jewish art can mean Jewish ritual objects,

“Jewish art can also mean channeling deep wells of Jewish wisdom, and mysticism, and tradition.” In their discussion of his process, work, and themes. Brujis described how he was drawn at a very early age to representation and ideas of energy, which he said he sometimes felt by putting his hands onto a piece of paper. He loved drawing things, starting with superheroes.

Rabbi Berman observed, “Art and philosophy plays through all of your work and especially in this show, which is about your subconscious or the subconscious and how it plays through spirituality, as well.” She noted the energy of 20th-century artists Matisse, Kandinsky, Miro, Matta, Ensor, Gottlieb, Rothko, and Dubuffet in his work, which Brujis acknowledged as culturally important for their times and a catalyst for his ideas on space, feelings, and humanity. He explained,

“I look to the past, not to stay there, but to draw from it and take things to a next stage. It’s important to be regressive and progressive at the same time, because I want to be linked with the tradition.”

Among the works capturing moments in his life, he pointed to Never Again, created as his visceral response to the devastating terrorist attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. “The more personal I become, the more universal I become. The closer I can be to my experience right now, the closer I can be to all of you.”

When Rabbi Berman questioned “how the elements of spirituality and subconscious, philosophy and science play out in your work,” he replied, “I don’t know what is going to be the final image when I start. I aim to become like a channeled spirit, so that it’s not me who’s working, but it becomes an intuitive process of discovery. But that sounds like I’m just throwing paint around, and that’s not what happens—it’s because I have thirty years of experience, knowledge, awareness of history and what’s going on right now in the world. I know how to make paint make music…I’m actually tapping into something that I could never predict consciously.”

Rabbi Berman suggested that viewers look at his work frontally and from the sides to grasp the complexity of layering in his work. Brujis described how the layers of his painting come together to become a whole and how at times he will sacrifice a section he feels is beautiful but doesn’t serve the integrity of the whole painting. When he feels he has something that he says has its own personality, then he cannot touch it anymore, “it’s like it’s left me and become it, it’s complete, it’s whole.”

 

Location: Heller Museum, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,
One West Fourth Street, New York
Admission: Free, photo ID required.
Hours: Mondays through Thursdays, 9 am – 6:30 pm
Tours/Information: hellermuseum@huc.edu; 212-824-2218
Download: The artists’ guide to this exhibition on the free Bloomberg Connects app.
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