In the mid-1970s, Bonnie Bronson stepped away from the Abstract Expressionism in which she had demonstrated precocious fluency. Working with what she called “modulars,” including reliefs made from block-like components to grid and other serial structures, she embarked on the most successful and productive decade of her sadly abbreviated career.

Bonnie Bronson: Material Textures looks at a selection of these works, demonstrating Bronson’s tactile virtuousity, as she moved with ease from torn cardboard to automotive lacquer-finished steel. Apart from its sensual pleasures, Bronson’s work of this period also proposed an alternative solution to the [post-]minimal methods of the time, and remains a vibrant example.

In Bronson’s work, the simplest structures contain extraordinary content; actual windows of Nature Study frame a fragmented “landscape” that may as well be the body of a giant; a simple grid can become a kaleidoscopic pattern; the reductive forms of geometric abstraction might overlay in an improbably orchestrated riot of richly colored “plate tectonics.”

The extreme materiality of Bronson’s work also became, almost paradoxically, a lovingly indifferent equality; what began as the common enough use of a stand-in material (cardboard) for macquettes and models became a remarkable demonstration of the notional equivalence of cardboard and steel.

She often treated form as almost hieratic: the modulations in and through material, medium and color proceed with their own autonomy.

One of Portland’s best known artists in the 1970s and 1980s, Bonnie Bronson (1940-1990) was recognized for her signature enameled steel relief sculptures and her collaborations on public art projects with husband, Lee Kelly. Her career lasted from 1964 to 1990, when she died in a mountaineering accident on Mt. Adams.

A Portland native, she attended the University of Kansas and the University of Oregon, before settling at the Portland Art Museum School (now PNCA) in 1959-61.  She married sculptor Lee Kelly in 1961, living and working in the Portland area, primarily at their studio farm, Leland Iron Works, outside Oregon City.

Her work was shown in Portland and throughout the Pacific Northwest at, among others, Blackfish Gallery, the Fountain Gallery, the Art Gym at Marylhurst College and the Elizabeth Leach Gallery.  Her work was the subject of solo exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 1979 and a posthumous survey there in 1993. In the fall of 2011, her work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, Bonnie Bronson: Works 1960–1990 at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Bonnie Bronson: The Early Years, a selection of paintings and sculpture from the 1960’s, at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

The Estate of Bonnie Bronson is represented by the Elizabeth Leach Gallery.