Whitney Bedford: Sunsetting
In Sunsetting, Bedford’s paintings continue her Veduta series–interpretations of historical landscape paintings–shifting her focus to turn-of-the-century sunset and moonlight paintings. Primarily referencing paintings by Edvard Munch and Félix Vallotton, Bedford’s works situate the historic landscape within an architectural stage-like space alongside contemporary flora and fauna, looking outward as if observing landscapes past. Approaching these scenes of nature through a temporal lens, Bedford’s works tap into the emotional potential of the sunset genre, drawing on the symbolism of endings, beginnings, rebirth, and renewal.
Painted in vivid and vibrant hues, each sunset offers a meditation on the passage of time and its cyclical nature. For Bedford, the sunsets are particularly poignant at this moment–politically and environmentally–as signifiers of the end of an era or harbingers of change. For Munch and Vallotton, the emotional charge of the sunsets symbolized the anxiety of their time and the drastic societal changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, leading up to the First World War. Bedford’s return to these themes draws comparisons a century later to our current moment, offering a visual allegory for the inevitability of change.
In several paintings, Bedford includes palm trees–quintessentially Californian trees–some of which were damaged by fire. These trees were drawn from images Bedford took of the devastation in her neighborhood in the Palisades after the recent wildfires. The wildfires, which took place midway through the production for her exhibition, dramatically underscore the symbolism of the sunsets. Her Veduta paintings, already expressing the despair of witnessing climate change, are now permeated by the trauma of the recent devastation.
Bedford’s works are both cautionary and hopeful. The transformative beauty of the sunsets is eclipsed by the anxiety of a new era approaching. With every end, there is a beginning, and with every beginning, there is grief for what once was. Bedford’s works occupy this space of in-betweenness and revel in the sublime power and ultimate hope of nature.
Whitney Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She won the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale and received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. Bedford recently had a solo exhibition last year at The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art titled “The Window,” curated by Emma Saperstein. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; the Jewish Museum, New York; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Bedford’s work is included in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; the De La Cruz Collection, Miami, Florida, USA; The Saatchi Collection, London, England; the Francois Pinault Collection, Paris, France; the Eric Decelle Collection, Brussels, Belgium; and the Collection Ginette Moulin/Guillaume Houze, Paris, France.