About
Beatrice Bonino’s (*1992, Turin) work often takes containers like a found box, a ceramic vessel, or in looser terms, domestic space, as a starting point for her subtle play with texture, conditions of visibility and material connotations. As she moves between accentuating and destabilizing the act of containing, she also probes what it means to fasten—what that looks or feels like. In recent works, bows, pins, and locks stand as various modes of fastening something, as well as flourishes that evoke the significance of the ornamental in alternative histories of abstraction. There is an uncanny quality to Bonino’s reimaginings as she treads a line between tapping into something deeply familiar and insistently strange, furthered by the way she employs materials seemingly against themselves: pinning cellophane, tying bows with lead or more broadly in asking what happens if rearranged remnants of vaguely banal household aesthetics are placed on a pedestal. The Paris-based artist holds a PhD in Sanskrit, and while her academic experience is distinct from her most recent sculptural practice, nearly fifteen years of studying ancient languages seems to imbue her work with a sense of piecing together forgotten modes of communication. Beatrice Bonino's exhibition
Cosetta is on view through July 28 at the Bonner Kunstverein. Her work will also be included in a group show opening at MACRO, Rome this summer.
