How Louise Bonnet Learned To Stop Thinking

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. The painter, who is in her early fifties, is a relative rarity in the world of fine art: after working quietly in her studio for years without major recognition, she began achieving substantial critical and commercial success just in the past half decade. Recently, she has shown her work at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Hong Kong outpost of Gagosian gallery, by which she is represented, and she is now exhibiting a suite of new paintings at Gagosian in New York. In these works, she continues her preoccupation with the tumescent naked body on display—at once an object in a vanitas arrangement and a subject stretching toward full personhood.