Bosse & Baum, London
Bea Bonafini
Bosse & Baum is presenting new works by artist Bea Bonafini (b. 1990) who works across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles and performance. A series of new small works on paper will be shown alongside new engraved and inlayed cork works by Bonafini, displayed on a painted design for the booth walls. The artist works with performance so if the format allows there might be a live element in the booth. Bonafini explores the use of painting across mixed media in her work, where the breadth of her practice, often between functionality and the aesthetic, deciphers the ambiguous relationship between painting and craft, as well as craftsmanship as a set of skills that are being gradually eradicated from our daily lives as a result of the convergence towards a technology-led lifestyle.
The use of cork follows Bonafini’s interest in the use of materials that have a softness to them, which can be stained and have a prominent texture of their own, commonly used by artisans, In this case cork is used in interior design, as insulation, and in the wine and fashion industry. It is a sustainable material, leaving the tree unharmed, harvested every 9 years from the cork oak tree. The subject matter of these works is entangled with the artist’s fascination of Etruscan imagery, and the mysteries related to this Ancient Italian civilisation, whose tomb and ceramic paintings are fresh with life and magic.
Bea Bonafini’s interdisciplinary practice is often textile-based and socially engaged; inspired by confrontation in human relationships, ritual processes and notions of the sensual and the visceral. Testing the notion of comfort, her installations and performances operate on the boundary between functionality and the aesthetic. Bea continues to develop in her practice an inlay technique, following a horizontal process of continuous and obsessive slicing and splicing. She repeats the fragmentation to complicate the image, so that it appears in syncopated forms, to slow down the viewer’s reading of the work.
