Brenda Stumpf
Littleton, Colorado
Contemporary American painter and sculptor located near Denver, Colorado
Message
Brenda Stumpf (American, b.1972) is a contemporary sculptor and painter. She is a self-taught artist who began exhibiting in the mid-1990s. Stumpf's work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows, including the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Alexandria Museum of Art, and the Marietta Cobb Museum of Art.
In addition, the artist’s work has been juried into numerous exhibits by the likes of Jerry Saltz, senior art critic and columnist for New York Magazine; Christoph Heinrich, Director of the Denver Art Museum; Laura Almeida, who was the Curatorial Fellow and Acting Head Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum; and Kerry Brougher, Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Stumpf has been awarded a purchase prize from the New Mexico Arts Acclaimed Artist Series, won the Juror’s Prize from The Tubac Center of the Arts, and was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize.
There are numerous online interviews and printed features in newspapers and magazines, including The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Atlanta Homes & Lifestyles, and Southwest Contemporary.
Stumpf's art resides in over 350 private collections throughout the United States and abroad. Originally from Parma, Ohio, the artist lives near Denver, Colorado.
Statement
Brenda Stumpf’s multidisciplinary practice—encompassing assembled paintings, photograph-based transfers, and sculptural objects—conjures a durational dialogue between materiality and memory that resonates with the monumental gravitas of Anselm Kiefer and the lyrical poetics of Cy Twombly, yet remains rigorously personal. Her image-transfer paintings originate in black-and-white photographs of ruins, monoliths, and symbolic architectures—images that recall the spiritual intensity of Minor White, the ephemeral self-portraiture of Francesca Woodman, and the Southern-Gothic meditations of Sally Mann. Layered in mixed media, these works accrue sedimented textures akin to Kiefer’s canvases, embedding historical and mythic resonances within their surfaces while the photographic trace functions as both relic and apparition—a devotional gesture toward time’s persistence and dissolution.
In her sculptural repertoire, Stumpf employs found objects coated in concrete or reactive rust paint to evoke unearthed ritual vessels. Their tactile austerity and gestural construction mirror Twombly’s three-dimensional forays—both artists elevate humble materials to the mythic through processes of erosion, reconstruction, and concealment. Yet whereas Twombly’s spontaneity yields open-ended symbolism, Stumpf’s deliberative assemblages articulate a symbolic archaeology, excavating significance from fragmentation and obsolescence.
Across media, her work engages themes of loss, transformation, and the sacred. By reconciling photographic testimony, material decay, and sculptural relics, Stumpf forges a distinctive cosmology rooted in feminine archetypes and poetic introspection—offering not mere homage to her illustrious predecessors but a singular inquiry into the alchemy of memory and the indelible traces of what we deem forgotten.