Fonseca was born in New York to a family of artists. His father, Gonzalo Fonseca, was an Uruguayan sculptor. His younger brother Caio Fonseca is a well known contemporary painter. His sister Isabel Fonseca is a writer. Fonseca had dyslexia and a stutter, conditions so severe as a child he was treated by a psychiatrist.[2][3] Fonseca was able to compensate for his verbal difficulties with a tremendous visual fluency, reproducing paintings by Michelangelo and other Great Masters at an early age.[2] Raised in a house on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, Fonseca studied at the Dalton School in Manhattan and St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights. Fonseca failed to graduate from high school[4] and at age 18, he moved to Barcelona, where he studied with Augusto Torres. Fonseca lived in Barcelona until 1993, when he returned to New York a few months before his death.
Fonseca had what his sister called "a slightly perverse anti-taste for exquisite goods and 'luxuries' of all kinds."[2] He preferred old objects, old clothes and junk that he collected from the streets of Barcelona. He chose to live in Barcelona's red-light district, among the city's poor, cripples, addicts, street girls, and bohemians.[5]
Late in his life, Fonseca painted four large paintings known as "The War Murals" depicting scenes of warfare. The individual works are titled Tank (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 269.2 cm) Fire (oil on canvas, 207 x 284.5 cm), Bucharest (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 279.4 cm), and Timișoara[6] (oil on canvas, 210.8 x 271.7 cm). One writer described the anti-war theme in "The War Murals", begun in 1989 and finished in 1993, as "the most powerful statement of their kind since Picasso's great Guernica."[7] The murals were inspired by images of boy soldiers torn from the newspaper and by images of violence in Eastern Europe, including the public execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu.[2][8] His sister recalled watching scenes of the upheavals in Eastern Europe on CNN with Bruno and wrote: "The War Murals - Bruno's four larger narrative paintings inspired by the anti-communist upheavals - represent his greatest synthesis of abstract and representational painting, something he had struggled for throughout his working life."[2] Fonseca worked on the murals for several years, finishing them while he was suffering from the effects of AIDS.[2] A public showing of "The War Murals" was the opening exhibition for the John McEnroe Gallery in SoHo in January 1994. Fonseca also had a solo show at New York's Salander-O'Reilly in 1993.[9][10]
After contracting AIDS, Fonseca returned to New York. He married his pupil, German painter Anke Blaue, shortly before his death. He died of AIDS in 1994 at age 36.[1]
