Product Code Database
Steve Brudniak (born April 9, 1961, Topeka, Kansas) is an American artist, actor, filmmaker and musician. Known for highly crafted, unusual assemblage sculpture, imbued with transcendental and unique scientific elements; his visual art career spans over four decades, with work in the permanent collections of several art museums in United States. His acting and film endeavors began at the age of 13. Some notable roles include pivotal characters in Richard Linklater's Waking Life and Robert Rodriguez's Hypnotic. Brudniak was also a founding member of Spiny Normen and other psychedelic music groups from 1977 ‒ present and operated Victorian Recording Studio during the mid 1980s. He spent his elementary, high school years, and early 20's in Houston, Texas, eventually moving to Austin, Texas where he currently lives.Gupta, Anjali, ed. (2013). The Science of Surrealism - Assemblage Sculpture of Steve Brudniak. Merrid Zone. Austin, Texas. 198 pp.
Like a sign at the entrance to a splendid nature preserve, the information is a poor abstract for the ineffable. A dream retold will come off as boring description, but to be inside the dream is inexplicably rich. (Steve Brudniak, 2023) stevebrudniak.com: About, Artist's statement. Accessed January 7, 2025
During the 1980s Brudniak was an active member of the Houston Alternative Art scene and represented by four different galleries during this time. In 1988 he moved to Austin, Texas, Texas, where he continues to work from his Bouldin Creek studio. His art has been included well over 100 exhibitions, and is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Antonio Museum of Art; Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; El Paso Museum of Art; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.Greene, Alison de Lima (2000). Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts. Harry N. Abrams, INC Publishers. New York, NY. 278 pp. (see pages 109-110 & 227) Reese, Becky Duval (foreword & introduction), with contributions from Ben Fyffe et al. (2006). Texas 100: Selections from the El Paso Museum of Art. El Paso Museum of Art. El Paso, Texas. 125 pp. In 2008 his Astrogeneris Mementos became the first assemblage sculptures exhibited in outer space, taken aboard the International Space Station by entrepreneur and astronaut Richard Garriott.Brannon, Mike (2018). Profile, Steve Burdniak: Psychedelic Surrrealism Texas Style. 71 Magazine, Jan/Feb 2018: 66-75 pp.
Brudniak's assemblages engage the phenomena of consciousness through applications of experimental phenomenal media, incorporating, often pioneering, unconventional and scientific elements such as high voltage electricity, Gyroscope mechanics, combustion, ultraviolet, laser, optical and fiber optic technologies, as well as the oldest known geological and living preservations. His 1987 Imogene Icon (collection of San Antonio Museum of Art)Hendricks, Patricia D. & Becky Duval Reese (1989). A Century of Sculpture in Texas 1889-1989. University of Texas Press. Austin, Texas xiii, 185 pp. (see pages 113-114 & 153) is considered the earliest application of a Tesla coil incorporated into a permanent sculpture and his 1991 sculpture The Saturated Well of Baptism, the first to use magnetic ferrofluid in a sculptural context.Bunch, Robert Craig (2016). The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (Vol. 18, Joe and Betty Moore Texas Art Series). Texas A&M University Press. College Station, Texas. 214 pp.
Filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro writes, “Each of Steve Brudniak's artifacts is a relic from a time that never was, and each of them holds a secret. Through superb craftsmanship and a keen eye for design, Brudniak integrates science and technology into his sculptures: ...groundbreaking uses of retro tech shock, produce lightning, induce hypnosis, reflect impossible images and light and produce sound through interaction. Liquids miraculously come alive. Other works amaze merely with their unprecedented content and exquisite form. Brudniak fabricates, manipulates or re-shapes found materials into absolutely coherent, powerful works of art.”
His integration of found objects in the construction of art differs from collage by appearing to be operational machines or ritualistic implements that operate on psychological and spiritual levels. In her 1992 ARTnews review, Elizabeth McBride elaborates: “The landscape he has created with his latest sculptures is dark, frightening, reminiscent of ancient sacrificial structures and torture chambers. And although they are assemblages, they resemble real objects that at some time might have really existed. Thus the physical beauty of Brudniak's work is balanced by the horror of obsession, addiction, and captivity. Caught in such conflicts, we feel danger is everywhere…Brudniak achieves a powerful, exquisite range not only with real objects-how easy to slip into the trap, how difficult to climb out—but with illusions, whose most potent effects are created not in the gallery but in the internal world that each of us inhabits.”Elizabeth McBride. April 1992. Steve Brudniak, Lynn Goode. Art News, 129 p. Arts writer and curator Anjali Gupta observes, “His explorations of the self and the subconscious become deliberately and elaborately inscrutable vaults for the unknowable. He invalidates the deductive reasoning associated with scientific hypotheses in his conceptual approach but mollifies it in the aesthetic outcome. Brudniak tilts referentiality without mollifying it; rather, he encrypts it.”
Though Brudniak's work is sometimes perceived as dark or sourced from personal neuroses, it is often grounded in a search for spiritual “truths,” the exploration of consciousness or the ineffable. In The Art of Dreams, Visions, Other Worlds: Interviews with Texas Artists by Robert Bunch, Brudniak states: “And though a fan of mystery (UFOs, telepathy, gravity, etc.), I don't like to believe blindly. Finding truth in “magic” is more thrilling when it's undeniable. That said, I do envy the enchantment of the metaphysical, so as an artist I empowered this set Diving…to indicate, magnify, and reflect as a diagnostic for psych-spiritual dysfunction.” He later says “I'm fascinated by the way things we value are presented. In this case, the oldest living thing on Earth. I'm interested in triggering the unexpected within consciousness upon seeing something so out of the ordinary, in person, magnified by architectural glorification.” Elaborating on a 2018 sculpture, In the Wake of the Exodus Toward the Breach in the Gate , Brudniak says: “A chamber filled with forty feet of brass snake chain in oil and a four-million-year-old fossil were painstakingly retrofitted into nineteenth-century iron furnace frames. It was a real odyssey interpolating the antique brass dolphins swimming toward that portal (a distinctly unique engineered effect) into the brass ocean. The impossibility of what the viewer sees becoming possible is critical to my art. This sculpture embodies my best attempt at the ultimate goal in thirty-seven years of effort: words that cannot be heard, description that can only be sensed. This piece has to be met, and where you go will only make sense when you shut off your mind.” Bunch, Robert Craig. 2024. The Art of Dreams, Visions, Other Worlds: Interviews with Texas Artists.'' Texas A&M University Press. College Station, Texas. 264 pp. pages
His Treatise, Saving Beauty: The Painful Rebirthing of Visual Aesthetic in Contemporary Art, is a scolding commentary on the diminishing importance of visual beauty and craft in postmodern, contemporary art.
| Austin Film Festival Selection |
| Cannes Selection |
| Associate Producer |
| Co-Director, Co-Producer |
| Producer |
| Rotoscoped |
| Uncredited |
Selected television
| TV pilot |
| Series |
| Series |
| Series Teaser |
| Series |
| Spec. Music Video |
| Music Video |
| Documentary |
| Documentary |
Selected voice over
| Animation |
| Commercial |
| Spot |
| Video Game |
| Commercial |
| Video Game |
| Video Game |
| Animation, Sound, Score |
| Recorded 2008-20 |
| Recorded 1979 |
| Recorded 1979 |
| Recorded 1979 |
|
|
