Frieze Los Angeles

Booth A6

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present new works by Andrea Bowers and Whitney Bedford for Frieze Los Angeles. Both artists address the urgency around our relationship to nature—Bowers from a political viewpoint of eco-feminism, eco-grief, and the extinction crisis, and Bedford from a historical perspective through the traditions of Western landscape painting.

Bowers’s tender new drawings of extinct birds from the series The Dead Silence of Extinction set the reflective tone of our presentation. Drawn from images of specimens from the Auckland Museum’s Natural History Collection, these exquisite renderings of birds are a heartbreaking reminder of the fragility of the natural world and the harrowing extinction of wildlife currently underway. The meticulous, detailed pencil drawings serve as empathetic tools, highlighting the emotions we experience around these losses. Accompanying the drawings is a new cardboard painting from Bowers’s latest Eco Grief series—vanished bird species rest alongside images of women suspended in repose. The linking of environmental causes and feminist issues continues with Bowers’s inclusion of healer and poet Deena Metzger’s quote that serves to underscore the magnitude of the crisis by emphasizing the profound grief around the extinction catastrophe.

Bowers’s intimate renderings of extinct birds complement Whitney Bedford’s haunting evocations of the natural world. Bedford reinterprets historical landscape paintings by using vibrant hues to contrast a staged frame superimposed with equally dazzling flora and fauna. Bedford’s ambitious new large-scale paintings—comprised of nine separate multi-sized panels—continue her Veduta series. In these nine canvases, she reinterprets Vuillard’s 1894 painting Jardins Publics of people enjoying nature in the setting of a bucolic city park, and for the first time, she introduces figures into the lushly patterned landscape. Bedford obscures Vuillard’s scenes of leisure by placing a screen of orange, red, and green seeping willows, whose unnatural colors evoke a sense of ecological dread, in the foreground of the composition. Plants found in Los Angeles’s public botanical gardens provide the inspiration for Bedford’s trees and shrubs. Her re-interpretation of Vuillard’s work suggests both a mourning for a bygone era of bucolic plentitude and a critical examination of what seems now a romanticized view of the natural world.

The juxtaposition of Bowers’s intimate depictions of birds with Bedford’s larger fraught landscapes creates a powerful and moving experience that resonates now, at this moment of species collapse and a global climate crisis.