Installation Views

Works Exhibited

About

Gagosian is pleased to announce 30 Ghosts, an exhibition of ten new paintings by Louise Bonnet opening on November 8, 2023, at 541 West 24th Street in New York. This is the Los Angeles–based artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in New York since The Hours at Park & 75 in 2020.

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” Bonnet cites the opening lines of Arthur C. Clarke’s sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as an inspiration for her new exhibition’s title and theme.

In 30 Ghosts she is concerned with the lives that precede and follow our own—each the center of its own personal universe, like connected chain links—and with ideas of continuity and the future. The works on view in New York also confront the specter of death through structural and emblematic references to seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting, contrasting the vanitas symbols of flowers, fruit, and rich drapery with the artist’s more familiar bound and bloated human bodies. Some of these new compositions also incorporate renderings of short lengths of wood into their images of distorted nudes. The interpolation of these blunt objects into Bonnet’s unique mise-en-scènes alludes to movie and television actors’ use of “marks” to record their positions between takes for the sake of continuity, and to photographic models’ use of supports when spending extended periods in single poses.

#LouiseBonnet

Press

Gagosian
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Hallie Freer
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Polskin Arts
Meagan Jones
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Louise Bonnet and Stefanie Hessler

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

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).

Louise Bonnet, Johanna Burton, and Celinda M. Vázquez

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: 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.

Louise Bonnet and Dodie Bellamy

Louise Bonnet and Dodie Bellamy

Poet and novelist Dodie Bellamy visits the artist Louise Bonnet at her Los Angeles studio as she prepares for an exhibition of new works in Hong Kong and the inclusion of one of her paintings in the 59th Biennale di Venezia. The two discuss the power of horror, the intensity of memory, and their creative processes.

Louise Bonnet: Onslaught

Behind the Art
Louise Bonnet: Onslaught

Join Louise Bonnet in her Los Angeles studio as she works on new paintings ahead of her exhibition Onslaught, at Gagosian, Hong Kong.

Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2022

The Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, with two different covers—featuring Takashi Murakami’s 108 Bonnō MURAKAMI.FLOWERS (2022) and Andreas Gursky’s V & R II (2022).

Louise Bonnet: Sphinxes

Louise Bonnet: Sphinxes

Ali Subotnick investigates the artist’s surreal new series of drawings.

Louise Bonnet: The Hours

Louise Bonnet: The Hours

The artist describes her new body of work from her Los Angeles studio.

Five Films: Louise Bonnet

Shortlist
Five Films: Louise Bonnet

Los Angeles painter Louise Bonnet reminisces about the films that influenced her development as an artist.

Louise Bonnet

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.

Cover of the book Louise Bonnet: Recent Paintings

Louise Bonnet: Recent Paintings

$50
Cover of the book Haunted Realism

Haunted Realism

$120
Cover of the Summer 2022 issue of Gagosian Quarterly magazine, featuring artwork by Takashi Murakami

Gagosian Quarterly: Summer 2022 Issue

$20
Cover of the Fall 2020 issue of Gagosian Quarterly magazine, featuring artwork by Theaster Gates

Gagosian Quarterly: Fall 2020 Issue

$20
Cover of the Gagosian Quarterly: Summer 2023 Issue featuring artwork by Richard Avedon

Gagosian Quarterly: Summer 2023 Issue

$20