Brenda Stumpf Studios
Littleton, Colorado
Contemporary American painter and sculptor located near Denver, Colorado
MessageBrenda Stumpf was born in 1972 in Parma, Ohio. She received a partial scholarship to the Columbus College of Art and Design in 1991 and attended for two years. Stumpf exhibited throughout Northeastern Ohio, which included The Butler Institute of American Art. During the early 2000s, the artist won awards, gained press, received commissions, including the Ellet Library in Akron, Ohio, juried into an exhibit by Jerry Saltz, and began to show nationally and internationally.
In 2008, represented by Walker Fine Art, she had a two-person show with sculptor Jerry Wingren. She exhibited at The Denver Community Museum, BMOCA, and The Littleton Museum and was juried into The Foothills Art Center by Christoph Heinrich of the Denver Art Museum. In 2012, the New Mexico Arts Acclaimed Artist Series awarded a purchase prize.
In 2019 Stumpf received the Juror’s Prize from The Tubac Center of the Arts, an Honorable Mention for the James Renwick Alliance Chrysalis Award and a solo exhibition at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art. In addition, ZYNKA Gallery, in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Museum, included her in a group show.
Stumpf exhibited in 2022 at the University of Northern Colorado in a show co-curated by Laura Almeida of the Denver Art Museum. Stumpf has had five solo exhibitions in the last two years, featured in Southwest Contemporary Magazine, and shortlisted for the Hopper Prize. Her art resides in over 350 private collections, and she currently lives near Denver, Colorado.
Statement
The art of Brenda Stumpf conjures the mysterious and enchanted. Her work is both deeply personal and universally archetypal by way of the abstract and symbolic.
She makes intricate use of nontraditional and found materials akin to alchemy — imbuing them with an elevated sense of meaning.
Stumpf’s work has referenced female historic and mythic figures such as Pandora, Seshat, the Black Madonna, Hatshepsut, the victims of Jack the Ripper, and the women of the Inquisitions. She has also delved into her personal history, playing with nostalgia and memory. She continues to be inspired by the works of composer Arvo Pärt and the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Recently the artist has been using ink transfer processes of her photographs as a base for large mixed media paintings. The imagery is both manufactured structures and monolithic rock formations. The surfaces reference the decay of time and being left to the elements. They have an otherworldly quality, especially paired with her found object sculptures coated in a thin layer of concrete and reactive rust paint, which have a feel of memorial urns or ritual objects.
All of this points to Stumpf’s constant intrigue with the unknown, mysteries of the past, reclaiming lost knowledge, and the most elegant and melancholic aspect - the sublime.