missmonalisa

Art, presence, and return

25 years Mona Lisa Project

Florentijn Bruning Multimedia Artist Biography

Florentijn Bruning (1963) is a Dutch multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of painting, digital media, photography, and artificial intelligence. She was born into a large family of creators spanning sculptors, painters, architects, photographers, and writers, where art was not a profession but a shared language across generations. Among them were her parents, sculptors Wilna Haffmans and Gerard Bruning, whose influence shaped her early understanding of material, form, and artistic discipline. This lineage, deeply rooted in Dutch cultural history and quietly connected to Vincent van Gogh, forms an enduring undercurrent in her work.

For more than twenty-five years, Bruning has developed the ongoing Mona Lisa Project, a vast body of work consisting of hundreds of unique reinterpretations of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic portrait. What began as fascination evolved into a sustained inquiry into identity, perception, and time. Through repetition and transformation, the familiar face becomes a vessel for change, absorbing personal experience, cultural shifts, and technological evolution while retaining its enigmatic presence.

Her practice moves fluidly between traditional painting and contemporary processes, combining tactile materials with digital techniques and AI-generated elements. This hybrid approach reflects a world in which physical and virtual realities increasingly overlap, and where identity itself is constantly reconstructed.

Bruning’s work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, North Africa, and Asia in museum, gallery, and public contexts. She has presented her work alongside influential figures from contemporary art and popular culture, including Ronnie Wood, Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and others reflecting the broad cultural resonance of her visual language.

Despite this international exposure, her work remains deeply personal: an ongoing exploration of transformation, resilience, and the human presence behind images that have become global symbols.

Currently based in Spain and The Netherlands, Bruning continues to expand the Mona Lisa Project while researching new directions in AI-assisted art and environmental themes. Her work suggests that images, like identities, are never fixed but continuously shaped by memory, technology, and the passage of time.