Louise Bonnet

Known for her portraits of exaggerated proportions and grotesque features, Louise Bonnet continually explores emotions of melancholy, loneliness, nostalgia and grief in her works on canvas or paper. Her strong sense of corporeality and precise observation of the tension and movements of body parts result in bending extremities, bloated noses, swollen hands and feet. Bonnet’s protagonists, often situated in everyday environments and domestic interiors, appear involuntarily stretched. Their bodies seem to reflect a disturbing discomfort, an uneasy state of mind that makes their limbs writhe.

Bonnet was born in Geneva, where she attended the École des Arts Décoratifs (now called the Haute École d’Art et de Design). In 1994 she moved to Los Angeles for “a year off” and never left. In 2008, having worked in illustration and graphic design, she launched her career as an artist with a solo exhibition at Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, a gallery and project space founded by Shepard Fairey and Blaize Blouin.

Five years later a move from acrylic paint into oils led Bonnet to new creative possibilities by allowing her to introduce a greater sense of light and volume to otherwise stark compositions. The change of medium also heralded a diversification and sharpening of themes and references; still focused on depicting the human body in extremis, she intensified her approach, combining the mordant wit of Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) with the nuanced chiaroscuro of Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). Naomi Fry writes (in ‘How Louise Bonnet learned to stop thinking’, interview in The New Yorker, 26 November 2023):

Louise Bonnet’s large-scale paintings depict spectacular, Surrealist-tinged visions in which distended, grotesque bodies take center stage. Figures with engorged limbs, teeny heads, conical breasts, and curled appendages hover on the spectrum between the saintly and the animalistic. Influenced by horror movies, underground comics, feminist sculpture, and religious art, Bonnet’s works engage with issues of exertion and sexuality, pleasure and restraint.

Gender in Bonnet’s work, as pointed out by Gagosian, “is usually either overstated through cartoonlike inflation or left indeterminate, allowing the figures to function as universal stand-ins for unconscious drives and anxieties. In some images, this signature approach to the human figure is combined with an exploration of Christian imagery and its history in European painting.”

While Bonnet’s representations of gender and bodily function exhibit a dreamlike exaggeration, they also reveal an awareness of how established artistic themes and iconographies are rendered more complex —and more troubling— by present-day associations.

Bonnet, who counts artists like John Currin (born 1962) and Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) among her sources of inspiration is also influenced by Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920 – 1991) and controversial French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo. 

She recently participated in the 59th Biennale di Venezia, (The Milk of Dreams, 2022) as well as showing her work at Gagosian in Hong Kong (Onslaught, 2022) and New York (30 Ghosts, 2023). Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris (Bathers, 2021) and Hollyhock House, Los Angeles (Entanglements, 2023).

Works by Bonnet can be found in public collections like: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA, ICA Miami, USA, Long Museum, Shanghai, China, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA, MAMCO Genève, Geneva, Switzerland, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA and Yuz Foundation, Shanghai, China.

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