Bridget Enderle

Bridget Enderle is a painter and collage artist currently based in Reno, Nevada, where she is also an instructor of painting and drawing at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). Enderle has exhibited her work nationally, including at the Athenaeum Museum in La Jolla, California, in 2020 and 2019, at the UNLV Donna Beam Gallery in 2024, and at the Reno-Tahoe International Airport in 2022.

Enderle received her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2023. Also in 2023, she was awarded First Place in SAS, an exhibition juried by Christina Steinbrecher-Pfandt, and an Outstanding Artist Award by UNR. She was also a recipient of the Pattie A. Atkinson Art Endowment Scholarship, Holmes Art Scholarship, Sierra Watercolor Society Art Scholarship, Lucy Nieder MFA Scholarship, and Craig Sheppard Art Scholarship, among others.

Previously, Enderle worked as an urban planner and designer, collaborating on placemaking projects in public spaces throughout the United States and abroad. In addition to her MFA, Enderle holds a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University and a Master of Public Administration from San Diego State University.

Statement

My paintings and collage drawings examine psychological states of being through semi-abstracted realism that combines the languages of interiors, plants, and personal belongings as motifs. In my practice, realism and abstraction represent different ways of knowing and the tension between them, with realism embodying what is factual, literal, and tangible, and abstraction signifying what is felt or understood through perception and intuition. The latter way of seeing warps and fades over time. When I paint, I allow the tension between abstraction and representation to unravel extemporaneously.

Interiors and the mundane objects they shelter reflect the lives of the people who inhabit them. Similar to clothing articles, spaces adapt to the human form through repeated touch. The pencil rubbings I collect and collage into my work are an extension of this touch. They are physical recordings of singular moments before time and human contact further degrade or otherwise alter the objects’ surfaces.

Plants in my work are substitutes for the self and for people whose lives or histories are entangled with mine. These plants are continuously influenced by their environments, thriving in some contexts and obliterated in others, nourished or neglected, healthy or diseased, and contained or invasive.