Whitney Bedford: EAST OF EDEN

May 21—July 2, 2016

Carrie Secrist Gallery is pleased to announce East of Eden, our second solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist, Whitney Bedford.

“There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Whitney Bedford’s new landscape paintings combine static and fluid energies that challenge perception while revealing the effect of the sublime by consistently recalibrating the eye. The application of distinct media, ink and oil paint, appears both within, and on top of the surface of the painting’s structure, creating an optic sensation that mimics nature’s perpetually transformative relationship to its own surroundings. These paintings, presented in concert as a suite of imagery, reduce the gallery walls to simple support structures that, in turn, emphasize the rationality of nature’s chaotic beauty.

As a point of inspiration, Bedford has taken to Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, to explore the tension that exists between the beautiful (calmness and clarity) and the sublime (astonishment, fear and terror). The tenacity of the compositions on view are relatable to that never-quite-attainable place called “ Eden”, while simultaneously eliciting a metaphorical exploration of Bedford’s life on the West Coast.

East of Eden includes a series of intimately sized desert landscapes and an additional group of monumentally-scaled paintings executed in gold ink with the artist’s signature-attention to detail and deft of hand.

Whitney Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. She was awarded a Krasner Pollock Grant in 2015 was the winner of the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale. She also received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. She has been included in group exhibitions at 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 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.

A reception for our exhibition will take place on June 11th, from 4-6pm.