05/25/2026
Remembering artist Ragna Bruno (1935–2026), who passed away on April 6. Bruno was a gifted abstract painter, sculptor, and musician, who shared her warmth, grace, and talent with her many friends and collectors. Working with Ragna over the past fourteen years has been a profound joy. We will miss her indelible spirit.
Bruno held a singular devotion to her studio in Hancock, Maine. There, she worked in quiet solitude, exploring the intersections between landscape and abstraction, reality and dreams, intimacy and expansiveness, fragility and resilience.
Nature and water were an essential presence in her life and were deeply embedded throughout her work. For viewers and collectors, Bruno’s soft, lyrical approach to abstraction, ambiguity of form, and remarkable restraint and sensitivity, coalesced to allowed for a poetic, open-ended meditative experience.
A longtime collector shared her thoughts about Bruno’s work:
“When I saw Bruno’s “Pink Stripe,” I was moved to tears, as I am whenever I experience the exquisite illumination and beauty in great works of art. I am overwhelmed by Bruno’s ability to capture the light, ethereal, unexpected; of this world, but not; a completely personal vision.”
Bruno’s oeuvre reflects a life-long journey immersed in the arts, shaped in part by a multi-cultural, art-filled upbringing in Madrid, Spain. Speaking four languages fluently, Bruno became the trusted authority on period-specific Spanish frames in Europe. Later she traveled throughout Europe as a concert empresario and cofounder of Ibermusica, an international concert and music management company.
In 1975, she married conductor Werner Torkanowsky, an internationally distinguished conductor and violinist who brought Bruno to Maine.
