AMY BESSONE

Titled Our Secret Garden and running from April 1 to May 13, 2023, the exhibition comprises an array ofpaintings and a sculptural work that picture archetypal figures, either alone or in groups, in obscureenvironments pulsating with colour. Echoes of painted figures by Ingres, Picabia, Munch and De Chirico, amongothers, merge with suggestions of classical and neo-classical architecture, cartouches, and desert oases.Referencing multiple art-historical and architectural sources, yet reconfigured into ambiguous, dream-likesettings, and executed in an intense, almost digital palette, the paintings combine a sense of the ethereal with thehyperreal.

In one painting, a reclining nude is seen in a midnight garden along a path leading to a small arched structure; inanother, a figure stands in contrapposto pose beside a head on a plinth. Elsewhere, a bronze mask on a pedestalstares hollow-eyed at the viewer, while in another painting, a collection of figures and masks seems to be emergingfrom a haze of pinks and blues. Motifs including trees, arched recesses and an island fortress recur throughout,alongside the various figures in their particular poses—which also appear in miniature three-dimensional form aspart of a diorama, where they are reminiscent of chess pieces. In doing so, Bessone returns these figures, which shepaints from sculptures found on auction websites and sundry other sources, to sculptural form. The vignettes inwhich they appear make up an immersive, if also indeterminate, narrative—a charged, female-centric world oflush foliage, alcoves and abundant bodies, and a site of reclamation and reactivation for objectified forms.

Amy Bessone was born in New York in 1970 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Educated in the US and Europe—at Barnard College, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Parsons Paris School of Design, and DeAteliers, Amsterdam—her multidisciplinary practice combines paintings, ceramics, bronze and prints. She hasexhibited her work in numerous solo and group shows internationally, notably with Salon 94 and David KordanskyGallery, as well as The Pit, Los Angeles; Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway; the National Museum of Women in the Arts,Washington; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Her work isheld in the collections of the latter as well as MOCA, LA, and those of Frac Bretagne in France, the SaatchiCollection, London, and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver.