Project Room II:
Bruce Pollock: Circling West

Bruce Pollock: Circling West is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and West Coast debut. Pollock’s work reveals a fascination with mathematical systems and recurring patterns found in the natural world. For Project Room 2, he presents a series of seven abstract oil paintings and a sprawling, site-specific, pencil and ink wall drawing.

Pollock’s work is rife with fractal imagery and geometry in shifting levels of scale and density. His paintings are packed with ornate webs, honeycombs, and spirals, mimicking the logic of organic forms like corals, mollusks, and plants, as well as cellular and atomic structure.

The work in Circling West is composed of a fractal pattern of nested and self-organizing circles. The pattern is holographic—each part of a painting contains the same composition as the whole painting. Each canvas focuses on a limited color range; together all the paintings encompass the visible spectrum. Through a basic vocabulary of repeated form, Pollock creates intense microcosms complete with the illusion of deep, almost infinite, space. The drawing, on the other hand, seems to spread out and across the surface of the wall, alluding to a macrocosm—the ever-expanding universe