Artist Louise Bonnet on her absurdist human figures, on show at Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong: ‘I basically stopped censoring myself’
- ‘Here’s a world that has attracted me to it,’ the Geneva-born artist with a studio in Los Angeles says of the grotesque human forms she depicts in oil paintings
- ‘Onslaught’, her first solo exhibition in Asia, features recent and new work from Bonnet, who finds it ‘fun and interesting’ to see people recoil from her art
It took Louise Bonnet years after her first gallery show in 2008 to work out why her art wasn’t going anywhere. Trained as a graphic designer in Switzerland, the artist used to make relatively traditional figurative acrylic paintings and drawings on paper.
“I could see I was trying to do something that wasn’t working,” she says. “I wasn’t sure what the problem was exactly.”
And then, in 2014, she started working with oil paint. Her children had just started going to school and Bonnet had more time on her hands to experiment. She loved it. The richness and luminosity of the medium also unleashed a new creative urge.
“I basically stopped censoring myself, [and] this is what happened,” she said in her Los Angeles studio last week.
By “this”, Bonnet is referring to her monumental, impossible-to-mistake paintings with human bodies that are bloated, deformed and grotesque. They are ugly, and yet magnificent and compelling at the same time.
