CLAUDIA KEEP

Following her participation in the group exhibition Une Chambre à soi in 2024, Château La Coste is pleased to present a new solo exhibition of paintings by Claudia Keep. The American artist returns to the estate with a poignant, new body of work. Conceived as records of an ever-changing world, the paintings in Waggle Dance are imbued with an acute awareness of the fragile timelines facing many species today. While her depictions of bees, flowers, and insects capture the luminous beauty of the present, their delicate nature points toward deeper ecological questions.

Drawing inspiration from the honeybee’s “waggle dance”—the rhythmic figure-eight movement used to share vital discoveries with the hive—Keep’s latest works portray insects at a larger-than-life scale. These are not merely scientific observations, but profound acts of witnessing: a visual tribute to the fragile balance that sustains our natural world.

Text below by Claudia Keep.

Because of their smallness, insects often go unnoticed––a glimpse of foreign geometry amongst the soft folds of flower petals, an unexpected color in a field of green, or the complete blending in save for a pair of beady eyes. However, their diminutive size is paired with awesome abilities. Next to human chaos, the life of an insect appears to be one of remarkable purpose and order. Insects propel life forward; pollinating plants, spelling survival or destruction for forests and gardens, inflecting our world with shape and color, and filling the days and nights with their sounds.

Rendered in an inexact hand, my larger-than-life paintings of insects are not those of scientific precision. My view is not the penetrating eye of science that seeks to dissect and understand nor shaped by the acquisitive impulse that furnishes the kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities). I seek neither to collect nor capture, rather to witness and record; to report back to my audience (such as it is) and to remember, myself, what it was to see these extraordinary creatures. My practice is perhaps akin to that of one of the very insects that I have painted: the honeybee.

My paintings are a record of a changing world, painted with an acute sense of time and of time running out for many species. As temperatures rise, and meteorological patterns shift, it is in the natural world where first these changes are evidenced. Small at first, a flower blooming several weeks earlier than usual or a few more inches of rain a season, these changes may not quickly register on our scale, amidst the blur of what human life has become––bent as it is away from the sun and towards the blue glow of screens––but as the proverbial flap of a butterfly’s wing, these small changes carry the gravest import for life on our planet.

Claudia Keep (b. 1993) captures the fleeting beauty of everyday life through small-scale paintings rendered in soft lines and luminous tones. Drawing from life and personal photographs, she distills quiet moments—a patch of light in a room, the shadow of a roadside object, dewdrops in a spiderweb—inviting a slower, more attentive gaze. Her work finds reverence in the overlooked, revealing the poetic in the mundane.

Born in Low Moor, Virginia, Keep lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from Bryn Mawr College. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘New York’, MARCH, New York (2025); ‘Shimmering Waves’, LMDS, Shanghai (2024); ‘Somehow, Somewhere, Someway’, Marguo, Paris (2024); ‘In Bed’, 12.26, Dallas (2024); and ‘Almanac’, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2023). Group exhibitions include ‘Une Chambre à Soi’, Château La Coste, France (2024); ‘Southern Democratic’, The Carnegie, Covington (2024); and ‘When the Sun Loses Its Light’, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2022). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Plant Magazine, and Harper’s Magazine.