Pierre Bonnard

Acquavella Galleries is pleased to present Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing, an exhibition featuring over twenty paintings by the modernist French artist Pierre Bonnard [1867-1947] on loan from museums and private collections.

The exhibition presents works created in the last three decades of Bonnard’s career, focusing on the painter's visionary use of color and composition in his later paintings. Resplendent and spatially complex interior scenes, intimate portraits of his longtime wife and muse Marthe, vivid still lifes of fruits and flowers, and exuberant renderings of the countryside landscape are on view. Across these varied subjects, Bonnard innovatively employed perspective, composition, form, passages of abstraction, and incandescent color to convey the rich experience of how we see the world. Painting, according to Bonnard, was the “transcription of the adventure of the optic nerve.”

Bonnard: The Experience of Seeing reasserts the artist’s influence as a pioneering modernist painter whose style transcended the conventional narrative of modern art and who was often overlooked and described as a late impressionist painter. Across works from different moments in time and varied subjects, the exhibition explores how Bonnard translated the experience of optical perception with several tactics, such as shifting spaces, camouflaged and dissolving figures moving in and out of focus, and glimpsed forms hidden at the periphery.

The exhibition includes several institutional loans from museums including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated, hardcover catalogue with essays by noted art historians and critics Barry Schwabsky and Sarah Whitfield, which will be distributed by Rizzoli.