Vielmetter Los Angeles is proud to announce our inaugural presentation in our new private viewing space, the Greenhouse, Whitney Bedford: Veduta (Vuillard Vineyard).
 
Over the last two years, Whitney Bedford has developed an extraordinary body of new paintings – the Veduta series – which approach landscape through a temporal lens, drawing the verdant past into conversation with the increasingly arid present. Her newest painting Veduta (Vuillard Vineyard) will be on view in the Greenhouse, from March 20, 2021.

The painting re-interprets Vuillard's monumental painting Walking in the Vineyard , ca. 1897-1899, (which can be found in the collection of the LA County Museum of art). In Bedford's hands, this unusual painting by the impressionist best known for portraits of Parisian society, people in their surroundings (usually interior, urban), is shifted from a dusty, rosy, golden evening scene – pastoral and languid, to a bold floral-scape in hot coral, red, and lavender. In the foreground, separated from this historical scene of agrarian leisure and abundance by a modern glass structure, a fluorescent tangerine tree obscures the walking figures who were the ostensible subject of Vuillard's masterful landscape. 
 
The scale of the work is monumental (matching the size of the original Vuillard, 102.5" x 98"). When standing in front of it, the space of the work feels less like a window into a scene, and more like a space you can enter; it envelops the body. The figure of the tree, lanky and knobbed, clearly dry and hot in comparison to the soft vineyard flowers, shifts the focus of the scene and the position of the viewer vis a vis the landscape from the original where one might have felt they were walking up to meet another walking party in among the vines. The tree now occupies the space of the original viewer, gazing out into the vineyard, while the viewer in front of the painting now gazes at the tree, in it's modernist surroundings, through the window to the landscape beyond. The space between our current reality and past made palpable, calling to the fore questions of what has been lost and what there is that we must protect as our climate and planet shifts dramatically under the pressures of contemporary life.

Bedford received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. Over the last year, she has been engaged in a daily drawing practice titled Nevertheless, which creates a subjective archive of persistent powerful womxn and femmes and their impacts on culture, politics, and society. She was the winner of the 2001 UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennale and received a Fulbright Graduate Fellowship from Hochschule der Kuenste, Berlin in 1999. She has had solo exhibitions at Art:Concept, Paris, France; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; D’Amelio Terras Gallery, New York; and Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; 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. Bedford is a painting instructor at both Chapman University and the University of California, Riverside.