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Louise Bonnet
Planned Parenthood Los Angeles

Red Study (2022), a painting by Louise Bonnet, was sold recently to Lauren Taschen, an advocate for women’s rights, generating around $100,000 to benefit Planned Parenthood Los Angeles.  The donation reflects Bonnet’s desire to spark public discussion of the discomfiting topic of abortion. “I think it’s important to make public statements . . . about basic human rights,” she says. “No one wants to have an abortion—it’s a very difficult thing to live through. Not to trust women to make that choice for themselves is oppression.”

The work depicts, in Bonnet’s surreal style and with her familiar claustrophobic composition, a woman who is bleeding. “It could be her period, a miscarriage, or an abortion, or indeed another medical situation,” explains the artist. But far from being victimized or stigmatized, the subject is fully self-possessed. The image is consistent with Bonnet’s concern with the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled by men; she comments on how the blood in Red Study plays a similar role to the urine in Pisser Triptych (2022), recently on view in the Venice Biennale, which reflects on the unequal impact of gender on the status of urination. The conical shape formed by the blood also suggests an emanation of inner light.

To learn more about the donation, read an interview with Bonnet on Gagosian Quarterly.

Louise Bonnet, Red Study, 2022 © Louise Bonnet

Louise Bonnet, Red Study, 2022 © Louise Bonnet

Related News

Left: Louise Bonnet. Right: Stefanie Hessler

In Conversation

Louise Bonnet
Stefanie Hessler

Wednesday, November 15, 2023, 6:30pm
Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York

Join Gagosian for 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 will explore 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.

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Left: Louise Bonnet. Right: Stefanie Hessler

Still from The Brood (1979), directed by David Cronenberg

Screening and Talk

Louise Bonnet
Naomi Fry

Saturday, May 20, 2023, 7pm
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com

Join Louise Bonnet and cultural critic Naomi Fry for a conversation and screening 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 will discuss 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). After the talk, this psychological body horror film, in which a man tries to uncover the unconventional therapy techniques being used on his institutionalized wife amid a series of brutal murders, will be screened.

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Still from The Brood (1979), directed by David Cronenberg

Still from A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), directed by Steven Spielberg

Screening

Louise Bonnet Selects

May 19–June 7, 2023
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com

Louise Bonnet has curated a selection of films around the theme of “the body” as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph. The protagonists in these movies are ruled by their outer shells—their bodies—exploring how they are betrayed by them, changed by them, and how their lives are sometimes turned upside down because of them.

Bonnet explains, “These movies have all given me something that I remember and think about since seeing them and have also made my own body react; to some of them because of sounds, joy, horror, or all of it. These films have somehow challenged the part of my brain that judges and second guesses.”

Featured films include
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
All That Jazz
Audition
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
The Brood

Le Petit Amour
Under the Skin

Still from A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), directed by Steven Spielberg

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