ART REVIEW

Florentijn Bruning: The Image That Refuses to Stand Still

25 years. 963 Mona Lisas. One image that never stays the same.

Florentijn Bruning’s Mona Lisa Project is a long term contemporary art project that examines one of the most recognisable images in Western art history. Over more than two decades, Bruning has repeatedly returned to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, transforming the iconic portrait through painting, digital art, contemporary imagery and new technologies.

What began as an artistic investigation has grown into an extensive visual archive. The repetition is deliberate. Rather than searching for a final version of the Mona Lisa, Bruning asks what happens when the same image is continuously reinterpreted across time.

There is something unusual about Florentijn Bruning’s artistic practice: she does not seem particularly interested in making the next image. She is interested in what happens when an image refuses to disappear.

For more than two decades, Bruning has returned to one of the most recognisable faces in Western art: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. What began as an artistic investigation has developed into an extensive visual archive in which the same face is repeatedly transformed, deconstructed and reconstructed. Painting gives way to digital image making; historical references collide with popular culture, fashion, technology and contemporary identity. The Mona Lisa becomes less a portrait than a mirror of the culture looking at her.

This is the central strength of the Mona Lisa Project.

Bruning understands that the Mona Lisa no longer belongs exclusively to Leonardo, nor even to the Louvre. She has become a cultural sign, endlessly reproduced, appropriated, commercialised and reinterpreted. By repeatedly making her own Mona Lisas, Bruning enters this history of reproduction from the inside.

The question is no longer simply what does the Mona Lisa look like?

It becomes:

What does our desire to keep reproducing her tell us about ourselves?

The sheer duration of the project is important. In an art world often driven by novelty, Bruning has chosen repetition. Yet repetition here does not produce sameness. It produces difference.

Each new Mona Lisa becomes a small record of its time, revealing changing aesthetics, technologies and cultural obsessions.

In that sense, the Mona Lisa Project can be read as a visual timeline.

But Bruning’s practice does not end with the Mona Lisa.

Her Earth Keepers series shifts the gaze from cultural history towards the human relationship with nature, identity and inner life. The women in these works appear almost archetypal: contemporary figures surrounded by botanical forms, symbolic patterns, animals, colour and ornament. They inhabit a space somewhere between portrait, oracle and contemporary icon.

This is where Bruning’s work becomes particularly interesting.

She moves freely between what the traditional art world has often separated: high art and popular imagery, digital culture and handmade aesthetics, contemplation and everyday life. Her images can function as artworks, posters, book imagery or objects for contemporary culture.

Rather than treating these categories as opposites, Bruning seems to question why they should be.

Her work therefore belongs to a distinctly contemporary visual environment in which the boundary between artwork and image has become increasingly unstable.

That same tension appears in Hocus Pocus Focus, Bruning’s book about moving from mental chaos towards focus. At first glance, the book seems to occupy a different world from the Mona Lisa Project. Yet conceptually they are connected.

Both are concerned with attention:

What do we look at? What do we repeat? What do we allow into our minds? And ultimately, what do we choose to give meaning to?

The apparent diversity of Bruning’s output is therefore slightly deceptive.

Underneath the Mona Lisas, Earth Keepers, books, meditative imagery and digital portraits lies a consistent question:

How do we construct an image of ourselves, and how does that image construct us in return?

There is also an autobiographical dimension to this practice. Bruning’s work carries the energy of someone who has spent a lifetime making, questioning, dismantling and beginning again. The abundance is part of the message. Rather than reducing her practice to one recognisable style, she has allowed it to accumulate.

That accumulation matters.

The Mona Lisa Project is not simply a collection of variations on a famous painting. Its significance lies in the archive itself: hundreds of iterations gradually transforming one historical image into a contemporary cultural organism.

Seen together, the works tell a story about reproduction, technology, femininity, identity, popular culture and the changing meaning of an image in the digital age.

Bruning’s work is at its most compelling when this abundance is allowed to speak for itself.

There is no need for the Mona Lisa to become more beautiful, more spiritual or more mysterious. She has already survived all of those interpretations.

What Bruning adds is something more interesting:

persistence.

She keeps looking.

She keeps making.

And after twenty five years, the question has shifted.

We are no longer simply looking at Bruning’s Mona Lisa.

We are looking at what happens to an image when an artist refuses to stop looking at it.