Virginia Bridge

Virginia Bridge is a Bristol based artist, specialising in printmaking and painting. Bridge’s work eschews complexity, narrative or symbol and seeks a purely aesthetic response from the viewer. Form, line and, sometimes, colour are, themselves, the subject of the work. Simple geometric forms are used, sometimes derived from urban landscapes, simplified and/or transformed, in a process of playful exploration. Bridge’s work references the mid 20th century minimalist abstract geometric work of artists such as Ben Nicholson, Agnes Martin and George Dannatt, whose geometric abstractions were an exploration of 'affect'; the unconscious, irrational or emotional response to an image, as an experience in its own right, without representation or association with real objects or narratives. In her recent series of monochrome studies (‘etudes’) in etching, shown here for the first time, Bridge explores the interplay of line and form within different rectangular spatial frameworks. Stark geometric forms are softened by the exploitation of incidental mark making, incurred by the process of drawing onto hard ground with a ruler. These marks are characteristic of Bridge’s work. Bridge graduated from the University of the West of England in 2019 with an MA (Distinction) in Multidisciplinary Printmaking. She has exhibited widely across the UK, including the RWA, the Wells Contemporary, The Hepworth Wakefield, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, The Affordable Art Fair and various independent galleries. She is represented by Agora Contemporary and The Drugstore Gallery.