Louise Bonnet

Swiss artist Louise Bonnet probes the limits of the human body in her paintings, pushing its expansibility on a fine line between beauty and ugliness into the real-surreal. Voluptuous torsos and bulbous extremities besiege her paintings, an arresting parade of odd-looking noses, nipples, and wig-like clusters of mostly blonde hair whose glamour always comes with a sense of incompletion. Gender is alternatively exaggerated or completely neglected, sharpening the figures' enigmatic character. Held between cartoon-like joyousness and the masterful formality of modernist sculpture, they are stretching and bending in uncomfortable postures in an endless time loop. In her essay, Flavia Frigeri describes these paintings as the twilight of beauty suffused with an art-historical memory. "Through her eclectic approach to figurative painting," she writes, "Bonnet challenges and addresses normative aesthetic values, as well as ideas concerning identity and representation."