Bruce Kurland was born on May 16, 1938 in Bronx, NY. He studied at the Art Students League 1959-1961 and the National Academy School of Fine Arts 1961-1963.

He began showing his work in New York City galleries in the mid 1960′s and was later represented by Joan Washburn, Claude Bernard and Victoria Munroe. Bruce Kurland was initially influenced by early European practitioners of the still life genre such as Fabritius, Chardin and Morandi, whose quiet reveries he inflected with a contemporary vision of mortality. The artist infused his paintings with a powerful attention to and tangible affection for nature. According to Bruce Kurland, his paintings were ‘red in tooth and claw’ conjuring “a little world with which I could do anything I wanted.”

The paintings of Bruce Kurland are housed in private collections in the United States and Europe. The work of Bruce Kurland is featured at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art, the Burchfield Penney Art Center and other university collections.

American still life painter Bruce Kurland died on December 11, 2013 in Buffalo, New York following a long illness.

Sources include:
“Bruce A. Kurland Obituary”, Obits for Life website
Bruce Kurland; A monograph of his work by Avocet Editions, 2013

Compiled and written by Randall Weber.

Biography from the Archives of AskART.