Some artists have a knack for turning our world upside down with a stroke of a brush. Bruno Pontiroli is one of those artists.
Bruno is a French contemporary artist that specializes in a specific kind of surrealism. He creates oil paintings and prints of contorted, distorted animals.
Bruno started painting and sketching at an early age and had always known he’d grow up to be an artist. One day, about ten years ago, he felt an urge to grab a canvass and draw. From the very start he was drawn to surrealism – he wanted to depict the madness and weirdness of the world around him with a brush and some paint.
Soon he started gravitating toward animals and developed his unique style. His purpose is to get the viewers involved in the work by questioning the reality around them. The paintings depict something very familiar and mundane – animals – but in an absurd way. By distorting something so familiar, Bruno is able to reinvent it and create something new and exciting.
And if that’s not incredible enough – Bruno is almost completely self-taught! When he decided he wanted to pursue art, he started attending workshops to work on his sketching and drawing skills. But other than that – he did everything on his own. To get better at oil painting, his preferred medium, he used books and looked at famous oil paintings in museums. It took him a while to get really good, but today his art is as well-made as it is interesting and weird.
