Works Exhibited
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This is what my unconscious looks like.
—Louise Bonnet
Gagosian is pleased to present The Hours, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Louise Bonnet. This will be her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The installation will be viewable exclusively through the storefront windows of Gagosian Park & 75, New York, twenty-four hours a day.
These paintings were inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (c. 1412–16), the books of hours that functioned as time planners through the depiction of daily prayers and seasonal activities. However, rather than honest labors, Bonnet’s Hours foregrounds a series of impossibly distorted, ambiguously gendered figures engaged in nightmarish variations on mundane routines, such as eating and sleeping. Reflecting the nature of human experience during the crisis of the current pandemic, Bonnet’s figures, with their bloated extremities and faces devoid of features, are uncanny embodiments of emotional tension.
As its title and inspiration suggest, The Hours also mines the rich history of Christian imagery in European painting. Calvary with Potato (2020), for example, depicts blood gushing from a wounded finger—a synecdochical allusion to Jesus on the cross and to the experience of psychological pain. But while the injured figure writhes in agony, the minute size of its wound hardly seems to justify such a performance. Bonnet’s figure, with its extended neck, also recalls the tormented subjects of Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944). In Dawn and Vespers (both 2020), meanwhile, she sets pneumatic female torsos against imaginary landscapes, recalling Renaissance characterizations of the Madonna.
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Louise Bonnet: The Hours
The artist describes her new body of work from her Los Angeles studio.
Louise Bonnet
Filmmaker and author Miranda July joined Louise Bonnet on a video call to discuss life during lockdown, the luminosity of oil paint, and Bonnet’s forthcoming exhibition of new work. Longtime friends—and newly neighbors—the two reflect on their shared history and shared interests in the unconscious, vagueness, and the mixture of humor and pain.
In Conversation
Louise Bonnet and Stefanie Hessler
Gagosian hosted a conversation between Louise Bonnet and Stefanie Hessler, director of Swiss Institute, New York, inside 30 Ghosts, the artist’s exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian, New York. The pair explores the work’s recurring themes—the cycles of life, continuity and the future, and death—and discuss how the conceptual and pictorial structures Bonnet borrows from seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting converge to form a metaphor for hard labor, basic animal urges, and the things we often try, but fail, to hide.
Body Horror: Louise Bonnet and Naomi Fry
Cultural critic Naomi Fry joined Louise Bonnet for a conversation on the occasion of Louise Bonnet Selects, a film program curated by the artist as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. The pair discussed how the protagonists of the seven selected films are ruled, betrayed, changed, or unsettled by their bodies, focusing on David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979).
In Conversation
Louise Bonnet, Johanna Burton, and Celinda M. Vázquez
Join Gagosian for a panel discussion with Louise Bonnet; Johanna Burton, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Celinda M. Vázquez, chief external affairs officer of Planned Parenthood Los Angeles (PPLA), on the occasion of Bonnet’s donation to PPLA of the proceeds from the sale of her painting Red Study (2022).
Louise Bonnet: On “Red Study” and Supporting Reproductive Rights
Louise Bonnet speaks with Freja Harrell about her new painting, her donation to Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, and the role of art in the fight for reproductive justice.
