Donation
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.
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Louise Bonnet, Red Study, 2022 © Louise Bonnet
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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.
Left: Louise Bonnet. Right: Stefanie Hessler
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.
Still from The Brood (1979), directed by David Cronenberg
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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