Louise Bonnet: Recent Paintings

This book features nineteen paintings made by Louise Bonnet between 2019 and 2022. The figures that populate Bonnet’s work walk a line between beauty and ugliness, between absurdist, knockabout comedy and extreme psychological and physiological tension. Inhabiting sparse, eerie landscapes and boxed in by the edges of the canvas, they act out dramas of profound discomfort that plumb the depths of the artist’s subconscious.

Along with color reproductions of the work—including gatefolds of three triptychs—an essay by writer and editor Nicole Rudick explores Bonnet’s fascination with corporeal forms as “fragile membranes between the self and the world, and the most visible manifestation of who we imagine ourselves to be.” A conversation between Bonnet and poet and novelist Dodie Bellamy delves into the power of horror, the intensity of memory, and the intricacies of the creative process.