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Blood Roses: a cycle of souls
Solo Exhibition
January 20 until February 25, 2012
Ironton Gallery
3636 Chestnut Place - Denver, CO

Open for First Friday: February 3rd 6-9pm

Click here to view the 7 paintings
Click here to view in-process images
Click here to watch in-process video

Brenda Stumpf will present seven new mixed media paintings along with some pen and ink drawings, in an exhibition titled Blood Roses: a cycle of souls. In this new series of work Stumpf delivers a deluge of red soaked encrusted objects and material, onto surfaces where the death and rebirth of the feminine are invoked.

The provocative subjects Stumpf exhumes are the victims of Jack the Ripper, women who were tortured and killed during the Inquisitions, and baby girls of female infanticide. Almost as a salve, each of the seven paintings is paired and caressed with a poem by Pablo Neruda.

"Yes, these are very physical and horrific themes, but for me they transcend into the spiritual, the symbolic, and the archetypal. You come to see that the Destroyer can be activated within you, annihilating the beautiful, expansive, and tender parts of yourself - not with knives cutting skin, but in the psyche, slicing the feminine piece by piece.

For me there is a profound healing in the making of art, the simultaneous healing of one’s life, ancestral lineage, and collective pain body. It is a mystical and potent act - a shamanistic environ that transcends time and space and has the power of the cosmos. And because energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another, it is a wonder where the soul has been and where it will reincarnate to on its cyclic journey.” -Brenda Stumpf