Louise Bonnet: Monumental Swiss Artist Soars to Success

Louise Bonnet's solo exhibition, "30 Ghosts," concluded on December 23 at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, marking her fourth solo show in three years. Similar to exhibitions in Hong Kong, Basel, or New York in 2020, every piece was swiftly sold upon opening. These large-format works command prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, propelling Bonnet into the spotlight with features in The New Yorker, Artforum, and Hypebeast. Her prominence escalated further after participating in last year's Venice Biennale, specifically in "The Milk of Dreams," a major thematic exhibition inspired by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. One of the focal points of the exhibition was the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses, a central theme in Bonnet's work. Her surrealist paintings depict distorted and grotesque bodies, exploring the constant experience of inhabiting a body through characters with engorged limbs, minuscule heads, conical breasts, curved appendages, and faces often obscured by hair that occasionally resembles a phallic form. At the intersection of human oddity and sexuality, her paintings are both humorous and discomforting, revealing emotions beyond the physical - shame, unease, voyeurism.

In just a few years, Louise Bonnet has emerged as one of the most sought-after artists of the moment. As writer Miranda July aptly describes, “Louise Bonnet is a painter of round, fleshy, almost obscene shapes and people. But hers is a very clean, friendly cartoon world, so there’s this tension between harmlessness and perversion that is totally unsettling…You feel like, ‘Oh, maybe that’s just me'.”

Geneva native Louise Bonnet's career has skyrocketed at an astonishing pace since her first group exhibition in 2015. Her artworks now grace the collections of prestigious museums and public institutions worldwide, including Lacma and Moca in Los Angeles, the Long Museum in Shanghai, ICA in Miami, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and MAMCO in Geneva. At auctions, the median price for her paintings reaches $289,000, consistently surpassing estimates, with a record-breaking $738,345 sale at Sotheby's in Hong Kong at the end of 2022. In a May auction at Christie's, a 21st-century art sale amassed $100 million, largely driven by the outstanding performance of women artists, including the Swiss painter. In the same event, a buyer acquired her 2021 piece, "Interior with Orange Bed," for $403,200, along with works by other recognized Swiss artists, such as a Miriam Cahn for $176'400, and a Danielle McKinney for over $200'000.

Despite her career truly taking off in 2014, when the artist, in her forties, switched to oil painting after starting in 2008, the ascent has been remarkable. "At that moment, I gave myself six months for it to work, or I'd quit. Someone told me: you should try, you'll better achieve what you're trying to do than with acrylic," she recounts. The turning point came in 2016 with her first solo exhibition at Nino Mier in Los Angeles, the city she had initially visited for a year in 1994 after completing her illustration studies at HEAD and never left. During this show, Nino Mier sold every painting, and now, less than a decade after almost giving it all up, Louise Bonnet's market value surpasses that of most internationally recognized Swiss artists with longer careers, such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Ugo Rondinone, Pipilotti Rist, Roman Signer, Pamela Rosenkranz, or Miriam Cahn. Only Urs Fischer, another Gagosian star, holds a higher market value than the Geneva-based artist, whose rapid success is nothing short of fascinating.

Undoubtedly, exhibiting at Larry Gagosian's gallery paves the way for assured success. Representing an artist by Gagosian is a guaranteed investment, proven by an impressive list of artists: Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, Walter de Maria, Ed Ruscha, Anselm Kiefer, Helen Frankenthaler, Zao Wou-Ki, and many others. Followed by John Currin, Duane Hanson, Richard Prince, Sterling Ruby, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, and other heavyweights. In essence, it's both a consecration and a phenomenal catapult that typically focuses on artists whose commercial power is already established. While the Gagosian effect undeniably worked for Louise Bonnet, it only attests to the dealer's instinct in anticipating a phenomenon. In late 2019, Bill Powers organized a group exhibition for the gallery, the first without big names in Gagosian's history. "Domestic Horror" featured works by Louise Bonnet, Ewa Juszkiewicz, and other lesser-known women artists but united in strong and assertive art - figurative paintings with surrealist influences. “I think he appreciated that they were both older artists, and [he] had a visceral reaction to the work.”

Their paintings converged into a sort of figurative, neo-surrealist movement, a trajectory that the star dealer would introduce to his affluent clientele by bringing both artists into the gallery's fold. The success was immediate. "We have more requests for their work than we can fulfill," remarks one of the gallery directors. This boon arrived at a time when the market value of other artists on their roster was dwindling—a reflection, perhaps, of the zeitgeist and cultural relevance. Some collections showcase the wealth of their owners; others epitomize their avant-garde sensibilities.“In the art world, often, you’re successful as a woman either when you’re straight out of, like, Yale, and you’re twenty-six, or you’re eighty. But I think I got unbelievably lucky on many levels. I came along at a point when people were realizing there weren’t enough women in their programs. And I was making something that was right for the moment, so I’m very aware of the fact that, because it’s successful, there will be a backlash that’s probably coming soon. So that’s why I’m just trying to do what I want—because when the backlash comes, I won’t care. I just hope I can make enough of a good living so that I don’t have to stop completely. But, even if any other person on the planet will never want to look at anything I make ever again, I’ll still do it.” – Louise Bonnet