Louise Bonnet, from Venice to Hong Kong
From 31 May to 6 August 2022, the Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong is presenting Louise Bonnet’s first exhibition in Asia.
Source: Gagosian Gallery · Image: Louise Bonnet, "Projection 2", 2022, oil on linen, 213.4 × 365.8 cm (84 × 144 inches) © Louise Bonnet. Photo: Charles White
“But I think the openings in the body are where shame happens, but you always cover it. There are all these rules about all the openings in the body, right? Like, things leaking out—that can’t happen. That’s really interesting to me, just the body out of control, or things happening to the body and how you would react to it.”Louise Bonnet, to artnet.com (2020)
Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, where Louise Bonnet was one of the 213 artists selected by curator Cecilia Alemani to be part of the event, Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong presents “Onslaught”, the artist's first exhibition in Asia.
According to the gallery, “In Onslaught, Bonnet focuses on corporeal fluids as objects of societal disgust, investigating art historical precedents for their depiction and considering the ways in which modern aesthetic and ideological conventions complicate the ways in which they are now received (‘We are much more prudish about certain things now than people were in the 1500s,’ she observes). The paintings explore our sense of mortification at our own bodies and the way they seem to betray us by leaking, sagging, or failing in various ways. ‘I’m interested in shame and the body in my paintings,’ she states, ‘and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment’.”
“While Bonnet’s compositions are steered by her irresistible sense of the absurd, their subtle color and light also display sensitivity to the formal and atmospheric possibilities of oil paint. Echoing sources from old masters such as Lucas Cranach the Elder and Caravaggio to modern iconoclasts Philip Guston and Cindy Sherman and, crucially, underground comix masters Robert Crumb and Basil Wolverton, she walks a fine line between beauty and ugliness, comedy and tension. Seemingly imprisoned in stark, cramped rooms, and further restricted by the edges of the frame, her cartoonlike protagonists act out dramas of profound physical and psychological discomfort, reflecting instinctual drives and anxieties.”

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