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Lot Essay
“Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling.” - Miranda July
With nods to art history, yet working unapologetically in the present, Louise Bonnet’s paintings are complex considerations of contemporary art. With the same sensitivity to color and the body as the paintings of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, Interior with Orange Bed is a layered, complex, and surreal study of space: it evokes Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) as the supine body pushes at the picture plane, and it is like a painting by Salvador Dalí, with its long, melting forms, or René Magritte, with its interior that seems outside of time. With works like the present example, Bonnet—whose work was selected for inclusion in the most recent Venice Biennale—has become one of the most exciting and innovative painters working today. As celebrated writer Miranda July summarizes, “Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling…You feel like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s just me,’” (M. July, quoted in N. Reese, “10 Things That Inspire Miranda July,” The New York Times, October 6, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/t-magazine/10-things-that-inspire-miranda-july.html). There is, therefore, something inherently personal in Bonnet’s wonderfully strange creatures.
Interior with Orange Bed depicts one of Bonnet’s characteristically faceless figures upon the eponymous bed, as if being psychoanalyzed. Clad in light green, its long fingers are intertwined, swirling around each other like a small tornado. Behind it is a small, slanted window that is reminiscent of Robert Irwin’s Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977), which is embedded in the Marcel Breuer building that formerly housed the Whitney Museum and the Met Breuer. Like the diagonal window, Bonnet’s protagonist extends unnaturally into the claustrophobic space. As Artforum observes, “Like the love children of R. Crumb and [Johannes] Vermeer, her subjects are unconstrained by the logic of traditional human anatomy because she shapes her characters more through violent force than through technical precision—flesh is pressed, twisted, gripping” (K. Córdova, “Critics’ Picks: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman,” Artforum, April 4, 2023, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201902/louise-bonnet-78470). One finds humor and empathy within this almost extraterrestrial landscape, and we might reflect on the individuality and quirkiness of every person.
Interior with Orange Bed is part of a series inspired by Agnès Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, a narrative drama with quasi-documentary elements. The story follows a young woman who wanders the south of France, only to die alone. Despite this tragedy, the film is also a celebration of freedom and the possibility of finding community in the loneliest places. Of Vagabond Bonnet tells Bill Powers, “I was raised in an era when you always had to apologize, and be polite, and be careful of hierarchies. It’s compelling to watch someone drop those societal conventions” (L. Bonnet, quoted in B. Powers, “Louise Bonnet: Pissing in the Wind,” Autre, No. 14, p. 240). Interior with Orange Bed is likewise outside of society, existing in a space that defies the laws of nature and decorum.
Bonnet is also part of a contemporary Surrealist revival. She draws on Dalí and Magritte, but also Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. A comparison to Interior with Orange Bed could be Oppenheim’s Tout Toujours (1950), which likewise erases the identity of its subject. Bonnet and Oppenheim also share a command of texture, which adds an imagined tactility that further amplifies the strangeness of their quasi-portraits. Of course, Frida Kahlo is also relevant, with her frequent depictions of lying bodies like Two Nudes in a Forest (1939). Bonnet’s surrealism of our present moment is also technically skilled and optimistically speculative. There is also an unexpected connection to the late conceptual artist John Baldessari, who, like Bonnet, was based in Southern California. In 1970, Baldessari made a proposal to display a human cadaver in a room with a peephole, making literal Mantegena’s painting of Christ. Bonnet therefore can be counted among a longer history of art and the base materialism of death. Viewing Bonnet’s alien scene as a funeral intensifies the human qualities of her work, as well as the universal urge to look and be seen. She shows us the inevitable, and yet within the unstoppable march of time are moments of beauty, fascination, and interconnectedness.
Bonnet’s career has grown exponentially since her first group show in 2015. Her work was included in Stretching the Body at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy in 2021 and Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Texas in 2022. Her paintings are included in numerous international public collections, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Yuz Foundation, Shanghai, China and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Bonnet’s work is currently on view at Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Hollyhock House in Los Angeles alongside her husband Adam Silverman’s ceramics.
“I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is.” - Louise Bonnet
Interior with Orange Bed is a slice of an unknown life, one we can imagine only with Bonnet’s guidance. She tells the Dodie Bellamy, “I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is” (L. Bonnet, quoted in D. Bellamy, “Louise Bonnet and Dodie Bellamy,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/05/12/interview-louise-bonnet-and-dodie-bellamy/). The story of Interior with Orange Bed might just be one of rest, but it could also be something else that we cannot fully grasp, something sinister or hair-raising. Yet in Bonnet’s paintings there is always a sense of wonder and an invitation to dream.
With nods to art history, yet working unapologetically in the present, Louise Bonnet’s paintings are complex considerations of contemporary art. With the same sensitivity to color and the body as the paintings of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, Interior with Orange Bed is a layered, complex, and surreal study of space: it evokes Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ (c. 1480, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) as the supine body pushes at the picture plane, and it is like a painting by Salvador Dalí, with its long, melting forms, or René Magritte, with its interior that seems outside of time. With works like the present example, Bonnet—whose work was selected for inclusion in the most recent Venice Biennale—has become one of the most exciting and innovative painters working today. As celebrated writer Miranda July summarizes, “Louise Bonnet is a Los Angeles-based painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling…You feel like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s just me,’” (M. July, quoted in N. Reese, “10 Things That Inspire Miranda July,” The New York Times, October 6, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/t-magazine/10-things-that-inspire-miranda-july.html). There is, therefore, something inherently personal in Bonnet’s wonderfully strange creatures.
Interior with Orange Bed depicts one of Bonnet’s characteristically faceless figures upon the eponymous bed, as if being psychoanalyzed. Clad in light green, its long fingers are intertwined, swirling around each other like a small tornado. Behind it is a small, slanted window that is reminiscent of Robert Irwin’s Scrim veil—Black rectangle—Natural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1977), which is embedded in the Marcel Breuer building that formerly housed the Whitney Museum and the Met Breuer. Like the diagonal window, Bonnet’s protagonist extends unnaturally into the claustrophobic space. As Artforum observes, “Like the love children of R. Crumb and [Johannes] Vermeer, her subjects are unconstrained by the logic of traditional human anatomy because she shapes her characters more through violent force than through technical precision—flesh is pressed, twisted, gripping” (K. Córdova, “Critics’ Picks: Louise Bonnet and Adam Silverman,” Artforum, April 4, 2023, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201902/louise-bonnet-78470). One finds humor and empathy within this almost extraterrestrial landscape, and we might reflect on the individuality and quirkiness of every person.
Interior with Orange Bed is part of a series inspired by Agnès Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, a narrative drama with quasi-documentary elements. The story follows a young woman who wanders the south of France, only to die alone. Despite this tragedy, the film is also a celebration of freedom and the possibility of finding community in the loneliest places. Of Vagabond Bonnet tells Bill Powers, “I was raised in an era when you always had to apologize, and be polite, and be careful of hierarchies. It’s compelling to watch someone drop those societal conventions” (L. Bonnet, quoted in B. Powers, “Louise Bonnet: Pissing in the Wind,” Autre, No. 14, p. 240). Interior with Orange Bed is likewise outside of society, existing in a space that defies the laws of nature and decorum.
Bonnet is also part of a contemporary Surrealist revival. She draws on Dalí and Magritte, but also Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington. A comparison to Interior with Orange Bed could be Oppenheim’s Tout Toujours (1950), which likewise erases the identity of its subject. Bonnet and Oppenheim also share a command of texture, which adds an imagined tactility that further amplifies the strangeness of their quasi-portraits. Of course, Frida Kahlo is also relevant, with her frequent depictions of lying bodies like Two Nudes in a Forest (1939). Bonnet’s surrealism of our present moment is also technically skilled and optimistically speculative. There is also an unexpected connection to the late conceptual artist John Baldessari, who, like Bonnet, was based in Southern California. In 1970, Baldessari made a proposal to display a human cadaver in a room with a peephole, making literal Mantegena’s painting of Christ. Bonnet therefore can be counted among a longer history of art and the base materialism of death. Viewing Bonnet’s alien scene as a funeral intensifies the human qualities of her work, as well as the universal urge to look and be seen. She shows us the inevitable, and yet within the unstoppable march of time are moments of beauty, fascination, and interconnectedness.
Bonnet’s career has grown exponentially since her first group show in 2015. Her work was included in Stretching the Body at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy in 2021 and Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, Texas in 2022. Her paintings are included in numerous international public collections, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Yuz Foundation, Shanghai, China and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Bonnet’s work is currently on view at Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Hollyhock House in Los Angeles alongside her husband Adam Silverman’s ceramics.
“I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is.” - Louise Bonnet
Interior with Orange Bed is a slice of an unknown life, one we can imagine only with Bonnet’s guidance. She tells the Dodie Bellamy, “I like the idea of viewing the paintings like they’re in the middle of a movie, almost like a still. There’s a story before and after what you’re seeing, but it’s not given away. Sometimes I don’t even know what it is” (L. Bonnet, quoted in D. Bellamy, “Louise Bonnet and Dodie Bellamy,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2022, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/05/12/interview-louise-bonnet-and-dodie-bellamy/). The story of Interior with Orange Bed might just be one of rest, but it could also be something else that we cannot fully grasp, something sinister or hair-raising. Yet in Bonnet’s paintings there is always a sense of wonder and an invitation to dream.