Flowing, Floating, Fleeting...

“Life is energy: pure creative energy”, says celebrated author Julia Cameron. Nothing could better fit the powerful yet fluid and strongly sensual sculptures by Gil Bruvel, whose work impresses and intrigues viewers at first sight and makes them prisoners of its fascinating and inescapable appeal.


Diving deep into the complexities of life and emotionally embracing all its contradictions, paradoxes and dualities, Gil Bruvel has developed a very personal approach and technique to express his creativity.

His sculptures are made of cast stainless steel ribbons which, in themselves, successfully convey the message of the mentioned contradictions: they are made of hard, solid material, yet, they are gracefully sinuous and undulating. In the contrast of the stiffness of metal and the swiftness of the shape given to it, they stand as a metaphor of the hardship of life, the frailty of humanity, the fleetingness of time.

Disregarding the traditional full-body sculpture, Bruvel has chosen to work with the notions of volume and void, thereby assigning his art pieces with the duality he sees in life. The result is a stunning and whimsical feeling of wonder, of an inner quest about where our boundaries are drawn between inside and outside. The way Bruvel works the stainless steel ribbons in twisting strips and endless loops evokes the powerful human energy, which, in his art works, seems to constantly move freely and unconstrained by any physical boundaries.

As Gil Bruvel puts it himself, we are made of “ribbons of energy” and that is precisely what he so well achieves in his sculptures: to make us ponder about our strengths and our frailties, about how we get through life and time and how fleeting and fluid our nature is. As we look at his art pieces from different angles, more and more questions are raised, since they seem to change in front of our eyes and unfold into various shapes.

Bruvel – just like Rob Mulholland or Bruno Catalano, each in his own way – addresses fundamental issues of present-day life, such as our feelings of emptiness, our quest for a purpose, our identification with what surrounds us. However, he does so by means of a very creative aesthetic sensibility and thoughtful perspective. He stirs our emotions and strongly appeals to our senses through the sinuous sensuality of his sculptures. Even the names chosen for his works encourage this involvement of the senses: “The Wind”, “The River”, “Never-Ending”, “Dichotomy”, “Flow Series”.

Viewers cannot escape identifying themselves with and being inevitably attracted to Gil Bruvel’s sculptures, which actually challenge us to touch them and feel the ups and downs of our own lives in the evolving curves of his “ribbons of energy”.

As Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet of the twentieth-century, states, “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back...”, just flowing, floating, fleeting...