Exquisite Cuerpo
April 26 - June 29, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, April 26, 6 - 8pm
Rachel Uffner Gallery
Rachel Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Exquisite Cuerpo, Bernadette Despujols’ second solo exhibition at the gallery. An intimate meditation on family, womanhood, and ecological consciousness, the exhibition draws together a body of work that is both visually and thematically interconnected, creating a poignant, immersive narrative throughout the gallery.
“Cuerpo”, the Spanish word for “body”, references Despujols’ portraiture practice, which has long centered on the artist’s close knit matriarchal family and has now taken on an even greater level of intimacy spurred by the recent birth of her daughter Coromoto. In one painting, the artist depicts her newborn playing with a conch shell and guarded lovingly by two lounging puppies. In another, she reflects on her own body and personhood during her pregnancy. The composition pays homage to Miranda en la Carraca by Arturo Michelena, an iconic painting of the Venezuelan revolutionary in his prison cell in Spain. Despujols depicts herself in a similar reclining pose and pensive expression against an impassive, stone wall, simultaneously evoking feelings of tranquility, confinement, and anticipation.
The other figures in the show are all members of Despujols’ extended Venezuelan-American family – nieces, sisters, cousins that all live nearby one another in Miami. Her focus on depicting women immersed in nature is rooted in tenets of ecofeminism, which draws connections between the exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of women. The artist’s tender portrayals of the women in her family, shown against lush foliage and blooming flowers, provocatively explore the ways through which patriarchal society exerts dominance over both women and nature. At the same time, the artist shares how the experience of giving birth made her feel greater respect towards her own body and disrupted preconceptions of the fragility of women’s bodies. In Despujols’ paintings and her reflections on the world around us, the parallels between the natural world and the woman’s body are undeniable —both resilient, formidable, and uniquely capable of bearing life. These inherent bonds between womanhood and the environment shine through in each intimate portrayal of the artist’s family members as they repose in the garden, scramble up trees, and play barefoot among the leaves.
To create her oil paintings, Despujols works from largely candid photographs she informally takes of her family and begins the compositions with faces, conceiving the lines and contours that make up her figures’ emotive expressions before expanding outward to their
limbs, poses, and settings. She constructs each portrait with heavy impasto, building paint up with frenetic brushstrokes then carving lines out to reveal the underpainting beneath. Her unstudied portraiture, combined with sculptural surfaces and vigorous mark-making, evokes the profound human interiority contained within the work of Alice Neel and Lucian Freud.
The show takes its title from Exquisite Corpse, a game invented by the Surrealists in which each participant takes turns drawing on a sheet of paper while seeing only what the previous contributor drew until an elaborate, often absurd, scene unfolds. Just like in the game, which Despujols loved to play as a child, all the paintings in the exhibition are visually connected, creating a fragmented panorama that extends throughout the gallery.
Friends & Lovers
OCTOBER 6, 2023-JANUARY 20, 2024
545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10001
Friends & Lovers is an expansive group exhibition that centers on relationships between artists and their subjects and explores the infinite ways, both past and present, we are influenced by our inner circles. Just as a studio visit opens a window into an artist’s creative process, who they choose to immortalize through paint, bronze, photography, etc. similarly provides insight into who serves as their inspiration, be that a lover, partner, family member, friend, celebrity crush, or a fleeting encounter.
Friends & Lovers looks at portraiture through the lens of Alice Neel’s assertion that she painted “pictures of people.” Eschewing portraiture’s bourgeois associations, Neel sought to paint resonant, unheroic images of people in her life that were true to her experience of them, as seen in a bracing 1952 painting of her doe-eyed, young son Hartley. Likewise, works by over fifty contemporary artists encompass a range of tender, unexpected, complex, and personal moments with and connections to their sitters, creating urgent and ultimately timeless pictures of their people. Artists include María Berrío, Peter Cain, Sophie Calle, Srijon Chowdhury, Alex Bradley Cohen, Will Cotton, Patricia Cronin, Anthony Cudahy, John Currin, Bernadette Despujols, Christopher Duffy, Nicole Eisenman, Shanique Emelife, Awol Erizku, Eric Fischl, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ewan Gibbs, Jerrell Gibbs, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jenna Gribbon, Emiliana Henriquez, Patty Horing, Doron Langberg, Shona McAndrew, Dave McKenzie, Sam McKinniss, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Arcmanoro Niles, Aliza Nisenbaum, Jennifer Packer, Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson, Alessandro Raho, LJ Roberts, Audrey Rodriguez, Thomas Ruff, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mike Silva, Rudolf Stingel, Ruby Sky Stiler, Billy Sullivan, Claire Tabouret, Alessandro Teoldi, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jim Torok, Justin Wadlington, Xiao Wang, Anna Weyant, D’Angelo Lovell Williams, and Sung Jik Yang.
BERNADETTE DESPUJOLS:
OH, MAN!
OCTOBER 8, 2022 - JANUARY 29, 2022
2111 Flora Street, Suite 110
Dallas, TX 75201
The Green Family Art Foundation is pleased to present Oh, Man!, a solo exhibition of works by Venezuelan artist, Bernadette Despujols. The exhibition, presented in the foundation’s Spotlight Gallery, opens on October 8, 2022 and remains on view through January 29, 2023.
A text by Darryl Ratcliff accompanies the exhibition.
Bernadette Despujols Makes Painting Come Alive
What pictures do not fully capture in Bernadette Despujols work is how luscious the surfaces of her canvases are. There is a vitality, like the artist’s hand is the wind and it is rippling the surface of the painting, infusing the work with power and life. It reminds me of the verse Genesis 1:2, “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Despujols hovers over the work, which in turn demands the viewer do the same. Her techniques of scratching, scraping, layering, molding — approaching the canvas with the freeness of a sculptor — makes one lament how often artists choose to pursue a flat pictorial plane.
In her work Ciro, 2022, a man reclines on a white chair, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, holding a yo-yo in his hand, while a garden hose lays in a tangle by his feet. His t-shirt says, “Abortion rights are human rights,” and his melancholy gaze is looking away from the viewer. These men that Despujols is painting do seem tired, forlorn, and resolute. They are all reclining or sitting — and by the caked-up paint on their faces one can infer that they are in need of rest.
In Rafael y Sigfredo, 2022, one figure sits on a wicker stool in a pink, short sleeve shirt and shorts, while the other figure wears pants and a gray sweater that says, “Her body, her right, her choice.” Once again, these figures are not looking at each other or the viewer; it is as if they are captured deep in thought after some great debate. The cigarettes and cups of coffee on the table are remnants of their social life. There is a juxtaposition of the messaging of the t-shirts and how these men are painted which make them the most unlikely of activists. It’s a world where male support of gender equality is as mundane and uneventful as playing with a yo-yo, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes.
There are many tropes that unite this body of work. Despujols often uses a checkered, grid-like tile floor that is then echoed in the pattern of a shirt or a chair. Typically, there is also the use of lush foliage that can make it difficult to know if the subject is inside or outside. Her subjects are engaged in leisurely domestic activities; They are with their children, their dogs, and their birds. Despujols also clearly loves and is quite skilled at using the color white.
Although there are larger themes of intimacy and women’s rights throughout the works, the small moments are breathtaking. The way Despujols can work the wicker of a bench to have a slight give from the weight of the figure sitting in it. The simple scratch mark delineates the string of a yo-yo in one painting, and then the detailed braiding almost rosary like treatment of the string of the yo-yo in the next. Despujols is constantly working and reworking these concepts. It is not just that there are tile floors — it is that there are five different ways to make tile floors interesting. Now let me show you what I can do with foliage, with the foot of a sofa, let’s have eight different flesh tones make up a leg. It’s heady, dizzying, and delightful stuff from an artist who is clearly in love with the process of painting. Nothing is mailed in; if there is an opportunity to add a bit more soul or flourish — the artist takes it. That the paintings can be so ferocious and yet, intimate, and quiet is a singular achievement.
About the Green Family Art Foundation:
The Green Family Art Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.
The foundation’s mission is to provide a venue for, make grants to museums for the benefit of, and educate others about contemporary artists we believe communicate important ideas that are relevant and discussion worthy today and in the future.
The exhibition is located at 2111 Flora Street, Suite 110, Dallas, TX 75201. Hours are Wednesday-Friday, 11am-5pm and Saturday-Sunday, 11am-6pm. Admission is free.
For press inquiries, please reach out to info@greenfamilyartfoundation.org or call 214-274-5656.