Louise Bonnet

Los Angeles-based, Switzerland-born painter Louise Bonnet is hosting her third solo exhibition at Nino Mier Gallery, where seven new oil paintings have convened for their debut. Each completed one year into pandemic-induced quarantine, Bonnet’s new works are inspired by a film about an enigmatic wanderer in Agnès Varda’s French drama Vagabond (1985). Bonnet’s work teeters on the line between beauty and grotesque, enlisting exaggerated proportions and distorted features for her signature figures among vivd-yet-sparse backdrops, and this latest range is no different. 

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Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles is presenting “Vagabond,” an exhibition of new works by Louise Bonnet. Exploring themes of melancholy, displacement, and nostalgia in her practice, here Bonnet’s signature exaggerated characters follow ideas from Varda’s film—which follows the protagonist Mona through a portrayal of her travels that uphold a sense of personal privacy—yielding a sequence of connected scenes expressing frustrations about societal expectations for women to always remain accommodating and available. 

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"It's true that sometimes I've had to explain what my paintings were not about," Los Angeles-based, Swiss-born painter Louise Bonnet told me a few years back in her interview in Juxtapoz. That's a great insight into the part of an artist's practice that often we as writer's take for granted. The talking about what the work isn't. Bonnet is a rare painter where when the pandemic began, you got the sense that her characters in the works would be telling you about their experiences, that they would illicit even more a conversation about who they were. What these paintings weren't wouldn't be an option, it was about what they (and we) were becoming. 

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While barreling toward the end of this bleak year, we offer a bright spot in the wonderful variety of art books released this winter. (Excellent alternatives to doomscrolling, all.) Whether you’re longing for the familiarity of opening your mailbox to find a postcard from a far-off locale, looking to turn back time on your favorite city, or wanting to fall completely into a whimsical world with only soft edges, we have just the thing for you—or a loved one who needs their own pick-me-up!

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Bonnet’s exhibition, titled “The Hours”, wasn’t originally intended to be viewable only through glass. “From the street, it’s really hard to see,” she admits, noting that the glare of the sun can be especially punishing. “I think at night, it probably looks its best,” she says. But even then, Bonnet feels the paintings need to be seen up close to be understood. 

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These paintings were inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, the “books of hours” that functioned as time planners through the depiction of daily prayers and seasonal activities. However, rather than honest labors, Bonnet’s Hours foregrounds a series of impossibly distorted, ambiguously gendered figures engaged in nightmarish variations on mundane routines, such as eating and sleeping. 

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Swiss-born, Los Angeles-based figurative painter Louise Bonnet has cool cachet in spades and a résumé to match. Bonnet moved to LA after graduating from art school, but her rise to contemporary ‘It’ artist, with a waitlist of art collectors, was a bumpy transition. 

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Swiss-born artist Louise Bonnet is a painter based in Los Angeles. She is represented by Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, and Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles. Bonnet explores melancholy, nostalgia, and displacement in her exaggerated, surrealist portraits. 

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I like to highlight how we mask the fact that we are really just animals. There’s something ridiculous about the concept of underwear. To emphasize how we hide. The see-through veil has no practical application.  We tend to overcompensate as humans.

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The Swiss Artist who swapped Geneva for LA in the nineties to paint the visceral weirdness of the human body.

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Seeing a reproduction of Louise Bonnet's painting The Pond (all works 2018) on the invitation to her exhibition made me both curious and skeptical. It shows a woman posing in an uncomfortable, if not impossible, backbend curve, her form conjuring a shortened bridge, with her hands and feet under water. What we mainly see is a large body against a dark background. 

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Louise Bonnet arrived in LA from Geneva as a young graphic designer for a one-year job and never left. Now a painter, she’s inspired by comics, Popeye, Peter Saul, and Surrealism. She inflates parts of women’s bodies — noses, breasts, arms, and legs — to look like bubblegum, balloons, or funny sex toys, then covers the faces with haircuts shaped like a penis.

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Louise Bonnet’s figures—male and female, if they can be said to contour to recognizably gendered forms—lean more towards Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. Her current show at Nino Mier Gallery places a heavy emphasis on cartoonish disfiguration and exaggeration: fun, campy, and menacing all at once.  

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Occasionally a series of paintings comes across your feed or your email or however you gather your art appreciation, that just blows you away. We had that moment seeing the previews and eventually full body of work that is Louise Bonnet's newest show, New Works, now on view at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles. The ever-expanding legions that inhabit the world of Louise Bonnet’s paintings embody an intriguing and bizarre duality; they tell us very little while manifesting a whole shit ton.

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This sui-generis artist has long envisioned—and occasionally realized—exceptionally humane public projects. Her best-known piece is “Wheatfield—A Confrontation,” from 1982, for which the New York-based artist cultivated two acres of grain near the Twin Towers to draw attention to global hunger. In 1993, Denes transformed a gravel pit in Finland into a small mountain patterned with eleven thousand trees, each one assigned its own human custodian.

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Swiss-born artist Louise Bonnet is having her New York solo debut with a set of four new paintings and 11 works on paper. Entitled “Wakefield,” the series of work refers to Rhode Island town, which has become her summer retreat of late and where all of the drawings were born. She opts for her signature style of a protagonist through a torment of deceptively simple impositions — hair helmets, rope ties, attentive nipples, and loopy noses abound.

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Louise Bonnet uses the language of humor to talk about things that are sad. Her quiet paintings of oddly distorted figures are rendered in a cartoony style reminiscent of artists like Peter Saul or Kenny Scharf, but where theirs are riotous and boldly colored, Bonnet’s are placid and softly luminous. Her first solo exhibition at Mier gallery in Los Angeles feels like a fresh take on the now familiar intersection of painting and comic book style.

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