The Artsy Vanguard 2021: Bea Bonafini

But regardless of medium, certain themes run throughout her oeuvre, such as the recurrence of religious and mythological allusions, which have appeared in past shows at Lychee One, Bosse & Baum, and the Zabludowicz Collection in London—where she also studied, at Slade School of Fine Art and Royal College of Art—as well as Operativa arte contemporanea in Rome, and Chloe Salgado in Paris. This year, Bonafini has had solo exhibitions at Renata Fabbri in Bologna, and Eduardo Secci Contemporary in Florence, the latter of which was curated by Eduardo Monti; and her work has been featured in group shows at Lychee One and Cob.

Another common thread across her work is how we relate—to one another, to the spaces we’re in, to other species, and to ourselves. “With her command of color and texture, Bonafini manages to introduce a serenity into a space that allows viewers to contemplate,” wrote Rosalind Duguid for Elephant in 2017. Earlier this year, curator and art historian Kate Bryan echoed this praise: “She really puts the viewer at the heart of the work, so it’s so much about your physical reaction to the spaces she conjures.”

Bonafini’s 2017 solo show, “Dovetail’s Nest,” converted the Zabludowicz Collection’s former Methodist chapel into what what was billed as a “quasi-domestic, non-religious” sanctuary. The floor, inspired by the marble ground of the Siena Duomo, was covered in carpet collaged together from scraps in soft, feminine colors.

The effect of this underscored the way in which painting lies at the heart of her practice, even when it embraces all kinds of other media. She described this freewheeling, multimedia approach to painting in an interview published earlier this year: “I’ve loved widening the possibilities that can emerge from approaching multiple media using a painterly thought process, where color and pictorial imagery are most important.”

In other words, Bonafini likes to honor the traditional elements of painting, but also to play with them. She wants to hold onto the “flattened images, the importance of color, and the importance of composition” that have persisted in painting for millennia, she said. But equally, she likes to push against the form and material of paintings, the attributes of the medium that are “taken for granted,” like the rectangular shape and textile body of a traditional canvas.

A sense of dissolved boundaries resonates with Bonafini’s biography. She was born to Italian parents in the former West German capital of Bonn in 1990, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Her mother worked for the Italian embassy, a job that kept the family moving every few years and meant that Bonafini was constantly adjusting to new countries and customs.

She may have moved around a lot, but Bonafini says her visual references are deeply rooted in her Italian upbringing. Italy, she explained, “is a place that heavily relies on symbolism. You can’t turn the corner of a street without seeing a religious icon or an evil eye sticking out of a building.”

Like so many Italian children, Bonafini spent Sunday mornings in church, ambivalent about religion but taken by images of saints and stigmata. She soon came to realize that much of the visual culture of Roman Catholicism stemmed from ancient mythology and pagan rituals. “I went further back,” she said, “and then I kept going further back—just to see where those mystical beliefs started.”

Her 2018–19 exhibition at Milan’s sprawling Renata Fabbri gallery, “Ogni Pensiero Vola” (“every thought flies”), consisted of tapestries cobbled out of carpet scraps, depicting souls descending into the underworld and cascading off the walls. Rendered in shades of bright orange, the human bodies were positioned in such a way that they echoed both the contortions of a person falling and the shape of flames.

Elsewhere, Bonafini used carpets to create three-dimensional bodies caught mid-dive, that appeared to guide visitors from one room to the next, concluding in the gallery’s basement. The effect was similar to moving through a painting come to life, as if a Bosch or Bruegel were unpacked into a three-bedroom duplex.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the collective unconscious,” says Bonafini of her current work. She recently showed again at Renata Fabbri with her exhibition “Full Moon (Empty Stomach),” which mined mythological and prehistoric themes and blurred the lines between human and animal worlds. There were large-scale textiles, like the 6.5-foot-by-13 foot I Carry You Inside Me (2021), whose intarsia inlay shows the skeletal carcass of a sea creature midway through absorbing—or being absorbed by—another species.

Other works are about as close to traditional canvases as Bonafini gets: pastel on textured cardboard, cork etched and filled in with gouache and colored pencils. Yet they feel like they are part of something bigger, like shards of an ancient fresco unearthed at an archaeological site. In Prey, Pray (2021), a golden-haired madonna, her braid calling to mind a scorpion’s tail, looks up in either the ecstasy of prayer or the agony of suffocation as a pair of claws cinch her throat. The rational instinct is to turn away. The visceral compulsion is to keep looking.

The Artsy Vanguard 2021