Louise Bonnet

Louise Bonnet was born in 1970 in Geneva, Switzerland. She studied illustration and graphic design at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Geneva, now known as the Haute école d'art et de design (HEAD Geneva); the exact degree and years of study are not documented in available sources. Before turning her attention fully to painting, she worked for years in illustration and graphic design. She relocated to Los Angeles in 1994 and has lived and worked there ever since, shifting her focus toward the large, surreal figurative paintings for which she is now known around 2008.

Bonnet's paintings depict solitary figures with swollen, distorted anatomy: oversized hands, feet, noses, and torsos rendered in a taut, almost inflated surface, staged in ambiguous domestic or psychological settings. The work draws on both surrealism and cartooning, using bodily distortion to suggest shame, desire, and repressed feeling rather than to shock for its own sake.

Her exhibition history accelerated through the 2010s and 2020s, with solo shows at Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles (2016 to 2021), then at Gagosian in New York, Basel, and Hong Kong, and at Galerie Max Hetzler in London, Paris, and Berlin. In 2022 she was included in Cecilia Alemani's central exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale. Paintings by Bonnet have since entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. She continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Critical attention to Bonnet has grown alongside her exhibition schedule, with writers consistently focused on her use of distorted, swollen anatomy to stage feelings of shame, longing, and bodily unease inside otherwise ordinary domestic scenes. Her inclusion in The Milk of Dreams at the 2022 Venice Biennale, an exhibition built around themes of metamorphosis and the body, placed her within a broader curatorial argument about figuration and the posthuman. No single verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed with certainty for this profile, but the recurring thread across gallery and museum writing is the tension her paintings hold between grotesque comedy and real psychological pressure.

Bonnet's auction market is young and thin, consistent with an artist whose primary market has only recently scaled to international galleries. The highest publicly reported auction price for her work is USD 738,345, paid for the painting Faucethead at Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2022; the exact calendar date of that sale is not confirmed in the available public record. With relatively few lots to date, individual sale results should be read with caution rather than as evidence of a stable price trend.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Bonnet's work, and authentication runs through her representing galleries, Gagosian, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Nino Mier Gallery, along with documented exhibition and sale history. Her auction record is still built on a small number of results, so a single strong or weak sale can move the picture significantly. Museum acquisitions at MOCA Los Angeles and Moderna Museet, together with her 2022 Venice Biennale inclusion, are the clearest signals of institutional durability for a market this early in its public trading history.