Lucia Bru

For more than thirty years, Lucia Bru (born in 1970 in Brussels) has been developing a body of sculptural work based on experimentation with materials—paper, crystal, porcelain, cement, and plaster—and on the subtle interplay between geometric precision and random processes. Cubes, cages, grids, right angles, and mirrors are the primary recurring forms in her work. Both understated and complex, these structures result from a constant dialogue between controlled gestures and the unpredictable reactions of the material.

Lucia Bru’s creative process is based on a sustained focus on the behavior of materials. By incorporating uncertainty and chance, the artist conceives of sculpture as a space for negotiation with a mineral world endowed with memory, resistance, and transformation. This relationship opens her work to organic, animal, and human resonances, without ever compromising on a rigorous formal economy.

Drawing, photography, and video also occupy an essential place in her practice. These mediums allow her to explore subtle and transient phenomena—reflections, folds, shadows, hollows, or tensions—and to reveal their perceptual and spatial dimensions. At the same time, Lucia Bru has, since her beginnings, kept all of her essays and fragments, gradually building a physical archive of her work. This body of experiments, both methodical and intuitive, sheds light on the continuities and shifts in her approach.

Taken together, these pieces evoke, through their presentation and status, Eva Hesse’s Test Pieces and offer a reading of Lucia Bru’s work that is both retrospective and open-ended.

Published by Mercatorfonds on the occasion of Lucia Bru’s exhibition at MAC’S Grand-Hornu, this bilingual monograph brings together contributions by Denis Gielen and Qilan Shen, a preface by artist Michel François, and a rich iconography of over one hundred images spread across 160 pages.

MAC’S, Grand-Hornu, Belgium, June 14, 2026 – November 1, 2026