# Whitney Bedford: Sunsetting

URL: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/whitney-bedford-2025/
May 17 — June 28, 2025 · Gallery I · Artists: Whitney Bedford

**Installation photo credit: Evan Bedford**

**Opening Reception: Saturday, May 17, 4 – 6 pm**

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Whitney Bedford’s solo exhibition, *Sunsetting*, opening May 17th through June 28th, 2025.

In *Sunsetting,*Bedford’s paintings continue her *Veduta* series–interpretations of historical landscape paintings–shifting her focus to turn-of-the-century sunset and moonlight paintings. Primarily referencing paintings by Edvard Munch and Félix Vallotton, Bedford’s works situate the historic landscape within an architectural stage-like space alongside contemporary flora and fauna, looking outward as if observing landscapes past. Approaching these scenes of nature through a temporal lens, Bedford’s works tap into the emotional potential of the sunset genre, drawing on the symbolism of endings, beginnings, rebirth, and renewal.

Painted in vivid and vibrant hues, each sunset offers a meditation on the passage of time and its cyclical nature. For Bedford, the sunsets are particularly poignant at this moment–politically and environmentally–as signifiers of the end of an era or harbingers of change. For Munch and Vallotton, the emotional charge of the sunsets symbolized the anxiety of their time and the drastic societal changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century, leading up to the First World War. Bedford’s return to these themes draws comparisons a century later to our current moment, offering a visual allegory for the inevitability of change.

In several paintings, Bedford includes palm trees–quintessentially Californian trees–some of which were damaged by fire. These trees were drawn from images Bedford took of the devastation in her neighborhood in the Palisades after the recent wildfires. The wildfires, which took place midway through the production for her exhibition, dramatically underscore the symbolism of the sunsets. Her *Veduta*paintings, already expressing the despair of witnessing climate change, are now permeated by the trauma of the recent devastation.

Bedford’s works are both cautionary and hopeful. The transformative beauty of the sunsets is eclipsed by the anxiety of a new era approaching. With every end, there is a beginning, and with every beginning, there is grief for what once was. Bedford’s works occupy this space of in-betweenness and revel in the sublime power and ultimate hope of nature.