Statement
I make paintings about countercultural health and leisure practices. I am delighted by the unconventional ways folks have sought personal liberation through activities such as mud bathing, sunbathing, and nudism—practices that my home region of Southern California, in particular, has attracted. These personal rituals are the primary subjects of my paintings.
My paintings begin with a stain: the serendipity of the bleed is a nod to feminist lineages in art history and laissez-faire attitudes of societal drop-outs. I then paint figures indulging in activities that nurture their rest, pleasure, health, and well-being. I combine the hot, earthy orange of the deserts and the toothpaste green of swimming pools—sites that are rich in leisure history.
As part of my process, I participate in leisure spaces where the body is on display such as community pools, hot tubs and nude beaches to gather real-life experience. Exposure of the body is a constant consideration in my figurative paintings: what parts of the body I show, and the degree of legibility in each work in order to disrupt objectification and regain control.
Making paintings of the body at rest is a powerful gesture and has ties to art history (the reclining nude, for example) that I work to do with a revisionist, contemporary lens.
Bio
Virginia Broersma is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work focuses on bodies at leisure with a nod to Southern California. Her engagement with the art community involves curating, writing, collaborative projects, public art, and organizing support for artists along with her studio practice.
Broersma’s work has been exhibited at museums, galleries and alternative spaces in Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, New York, and Chicago among other US and international cities. Recent projects have been shown at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Latin American Art. Broersma has received several grants from cities as well as private foundations including the City of Chicago and the Mozaik Foundation. Additionally, Broersma takes on select curatorial and writing projects that relate to her interests in the studio and in 2016 was jointly selected for the Emerging Curators Program at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Recent press has included articles and reviews in CARLA, Art and Cake and Artillery Magazine and her published writing projects have included features on video artist Rabyn Blake, DIY Projects in Los Angeles, and various exhibition catalogue essays and interviews with artists.
Broersma lives in Long Beach, CA and her studio is located in downtown Los Angeles, CA.
Selected Texts
Press and Essays
Still Pending: Thought and Action as Feminist Aesthetics
by Susannah Magers
From A Piece of Dust in the Great Sea of Matter, 2019
During a studio visit some years ago in Long Beach, I stared into a canvas jostling with lush, viscerally-rendered flesh and limbs. Though identifiable as such, this was a different sort of portrait––a gestural amalgam of tangled thighs and arms perched atop a stool, in which the subject, let alone gender, wasn’t knowable. The artist, Virginia Broersma, a painter, worked with the human figure in a deliberately fluid, abstracted manner, so as to disrupt the subconscious processes our eyes, and minds, default to performing when we look at the body: define, judge, and categorize. For her, obscured visual cues function as a device to reclaim agency through controlled, and intentional, representation.
Art and Cake
These Creatures at the Wignall Museum
by Jacqueline Bell Johnson
November 11, 2019
It starts with a video piece exploring the charms of these creatures that are among us. “Will they turn to violence?” it is asked, the sound of the words lingering in that first alcove of the museum. It is presented on a cathode ray TV and the looped video has a dated aesthetic of the early eighties. This equating of women to animals, likened to unpredictable aggressors, can be taken as tongue-in-cheek or a shot across the bow. The video is Nancy Buchanan’s These Creatures from 1979. The piece seemingly sides with men, making them out to be potential victims. But the joke is not missed. Women, peculiar, unobtainable, mystical, incomprehensible (yet still part of the species)… every move they make to gain an autonomy and explore the depths of their inner creature gets checked with a pop culture desire to separate, quarantine, and control.
Long Beach Post
Barrio Baroque to Celebrate Women Through Music, Film, Art and More at MOLAA
by Asia Morris
May 4, 2018
The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA)’s Barrio Baroque, to be a night of women-held space through their music, film, discussion and art, is inspired by the museum’s upcoming exhibition, Judithe Hernández: A Dream is the Shadow of Something Real, the first solo exhibition of the Chicana artist, according to MOLAA...
...Performance, video and painting will be presented by locals Natalie Mik and Virginia Broersma in Afterlight, an art installation exploring the human body as “a site where power is contested and negotiated,” Broersma said.
The piece continues their conversation of creating connection using apparently incongruent mediums. The two also invited Virginia Arce to contribute a text piece to be included in Afterlight.
Art and Cake
A Painter and a Performance Artist walk into a bar…
A Collaboration between Virginia Broersma and Natalie Mik
By Amy Kaeser
June 10, 2017
"Starting something new is always exciting and nerve-racking at the same time, especially when you make that experiment public. The exhibition, “A Painter and a Performance Artist walk into a Bar…” contemplate new interdisciplinary modes of communication between Long Beach-based artist and curator Virginia Broersma and performance artist and Grab Bag Studio co-founder, Natalie Mik.
Long Beach Post
Upcoming Exhibition Explores Commonalities Between Performance Art and Painting
by Asia Morris
May 23, 2017
“A Painter and a Performance Artist Walk into a Bar…” is the latest collaborative exhibition hosted by Grab Bag Studio (GBS), a local artists’ collective recently established in Long Beach. Facilitated by GBS co-founder Natalie Mik in collaboration with Long Beach-based artist and curator Virginia Broersma, the opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 3 from 6:30PM to 9:00PM.
Mik, a performance artist and Broersma, a painter, discovered that despite their different methods of creativity, “collaborating on a conversation-based and process-oriented community project could be an interesting and challenging endeavor,” stated the exhibition announcement.
After Mik asked Broersma to show her work at GBS, the ensuing conversations led to them discovering common themes and motivations within their work, despite their contrasting approaches to art.
Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley
Text by Claire de Dobay Rifelj
January 26, 2017
Taking its title from two stories of profound transformation, The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley fills LACE with a lugubrious installation of works by Los Angeles artists that feels appropriate to the political cataclysms of 2017. Between the religious highs of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and the monstrous overtones of Shelley’s Frankenstein, the common ground presented by the objects on view centers firmly around the body, its representation, and its intimation.
The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley at LACE (installation view). Image courtesy of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Image: Chris Wormald.
Artillery
The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley
by Ezrha Jean Black
January 12, 2017
The curators of Ecstasy, Virginia Broersma, Nick Brown and Kio Griffith, characterize their show as an “exhibition and lab” (the latter aspect of which may be more prominent in a couple of the objects by Candice Lin included here); but its installation has the airy feel of a frame or skeleton – an open vessel for the viewer’s imagination. Their stated intention was to conflate the Shelley moment of terror that inspired her classic horror novel, Frankenstein, with the ‘ecstasy’ of Saint Teresa, but the inspiration is really the same: the Promethean fire urging humanity ever more ambitiously forward towards unlocking the secrets of the universe (or the gods), yet simultaneously unleashing the staggering hubris with which we desecrate that same universe. Nathan Danilowicz’s Volans Anguli, with its brutalist black beams fashioned into flying buttresses angled into the wall, or broken and criss-crossing each other, evoke both broken ‘skeleton’ and broken flight or ambition, even the civilization’s self-cannibalization. Annie Lapin’s paintings, hung mid-gallery as if they were doors (which in a sense they are) simultaneously evoke opacity amid transparency, a chthonic universe, and an ethereal bioplasm in constant flux. Naotaka Hiro has compressed what might be characterized as a similar birth process into a ziggurat of sausage (or shit) – rendered here as both video performance and sculpture. Works by Gala Porras-Kim, Valerie Hegarty, and video/performance artist, Cassils, and Candice Lin are no less striking. ‘Science project’ aspects aside, Lin projects in her five works here a ‘creatures of Prometheus’ vision – the notion of a pathway out of the gloom and chill that envelop us in civilization’s twilight.
Peripheral Vision
Beach Bodies: The Dysmorphic Abstractions of Virginia Broersma
by Grace Linden
October 15, 2016
Virginia Broersma does not remember when she first became aware of appearance. But feelings about her own body and bodies more generally, have been “locked…into [her] psyche”[1] since she was a teenager. She explains, “My image of my own body has always been linked to what others think of me and their standards.”[2] Broersma’s artistic practice, consequently, has been an effort to resolve these views.
Figure 2: Sunbather (Odalisque), Oil on canvas, 60 x 90 inches, 2014
Artillery
Virginia Broersma
The Lodge / Los Angeles
by Peter Frank
May 3, 2016
Virginia Broersma’s exploitation of wet-on-wet painting is not simply self-indulgent, it is lavish, extravagant, and delirious, amplifying what is already a relatively excessive technique into an over-the-top visual experience, at once ecstatic and excruciating. However much she may delight in the wet-on-wet method or want to show off her chops, Broersma’s principal purpose is clearly to rock the viewer’s world.
LACE announces its selection for the second Emerging Curators program, The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley, curated by Virginia Broersma, Nick Brown and Kio Griffith.
April 5, 2016
As Los Angeles’ premier experimental non-profit exhibition space, LACE created this program to discover and promote curatorial talent. The three curators have worked collaboratively since 2014. Their project was selected from a pool of 48 proposals that reflect the diversity of perspectives of the arts community. The jury comprised Helen Molesworth, MOCA chief curator, and artists Ken Gonzales-Day and Simon Leung. The exhibition will take place in January 2017.
This intriguing exhibition will feature work by artists who are inspired by the split second insight when transformation begins. The title alludes to the striking parallel between the moment when an idea hits and the moment life is conducted into Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s tale. Whether employing media in alternative methods or toying with history through proxy languages, each of the artists works in a space of ecstatic conductivity, a state of flux. Their subjects include ecstatic religious experiences, Satori or enlightenment, transmogrification, race, gender and sexual identity.
According to juror Ken Gonzales-Day, “The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley was selected in keeping with LACE’s long history of providing the Los Angeles community with exhibitions that showcase the experimental, the political, and the provocative. Unlike other exhibitions that have considered the issues raised by borders and boundaries in explicitly physical or political terms, this exhibition will expand and complement such inquiries by foregrounding the generative force of transition itself. More poetic than prescriptive, the exhibition suggests that we consider anew those states that might have been historically characterized as “monstrous.” The curators have selected artists who consider mutations, riffs in identity, revolutionary moments, and ecstatic longing as transformed into precious and potentially liberatory moments of change. “
Virginia Broersma is an L.A.-based artist, writer and curator. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at The LODGE and Autonomie in L.A. and at Fermilab, the nation’s premier particle physics laboratory in Illinois.
Nick Brown is an L.A.-based artist and curator who was born in England. His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationwide, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Drawing Center, N.Y.
Kio Griffith is based in L.A. and Japan. He works as a visual and sound artist, independent curator, writer, and producer. He has exhibited in the U.K., Japan, Germany, Croatia, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Turkey, Belgium and the U.S.
