Jose Bonell
Joan Nelson
Jose Bonell, Trapped, 2024
Jose Bonell’s elusive, figurative works are charged with anticipation, a wry wit, and an appreciation of the daily absurdities of the human experience. With quick marks and washes of paint applied without fuss, the artist conjures discrete follies, absurdities and ambiguous moments into being.
Catalan artist Jose Bonell creates figurative paintings that function like pictorial “what ifs,” proposing questions, suggesting absurdities, sharing secrets, or hinting at moods or narratives. Bonell captures his daily observations—an overheard phrase, an exchange on the street—and records his memories and daydreams with quick and immediate brushstrokes and a muted, hazy palette of grays, pinks, blues, and browns. The paintings are populated with people and objects that function as allegorical subjects for explorations of work and labor, class and taste, gender roles and expectations, comedy and tragedy, violence and desire. The paintings rupture our experience of ordinary, everyday life to give us a glimpse of everything that might be possible or hiding under the surface.
Bonell often crops his figures and their environments, suggesting that what is outside of the painting’s framework is equally as important as what is within. Conjured from a place of childlike curiosity, these psychological scenarios veer towards fantasy and fetish—an outstretched leg, a tiny mirror, a melting watch—where much is left to the viewer’s imagination. These fragmented moments call to mind the contradictory and chaotic nature of an interior experience set to replay. The resulting paintings appear like dreams or apparitions, with the ideas and metaphors contained within coming into focus with distinct clarity before they dissipate. Working in the shadowy space between magic and reality, Bonell paints a picture of a world engaged in lyrical anarchy.
Bonell’s tales spin a scheherazadian web, not relying on classic narrative structure but rather telling bits and pieces of stories, allowing us to imagine what we cannot see.
–Diana Ruzova
Jose Bonell, The Postcard, 2024
Jose Bonell, Tiny Mirror, 2024
Installation view of Jose Bonell, The Indiscreet Night; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR, January 21–February 18, 2023
Jose Bonell (b. 1989, Barcelona, ES; where he continues to live and work) was awarded the Prix Novembre in Vitry-sur-Seine, France, in 2020. His works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions at Various Small Fires (VSF) in Los Angeles, CA: Semiose in Paris, FR; and White Columns, New York, NY. Bonell will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Adams and Ollman opening in November 2024. Alongside Sara Bonache, he is the co-director of Unica Editions, founded in 2020, which publishes artist’s books and objects in limited series.
Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2024
Joan Nelson employs a painterly maximalism to conjure landforms, skies, and seas that are sublime and surreal, and touch on key themes of feminism, spiritualism, science fiction, and the environment.
Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2024
Joan Nelson, Untitled, 2024
American artist Joan Nelson occupies a unique place in the long history of landscape painting. Her works simultaneously speak to the experience of landscape and the complexity of representation, artfully incorporating reality, memory, and mediated experience. With a painterly maximalism, she depicts landforms, skies, and seas that are sublime and surreal, responding shrewdly to the conditions of feminism, spiritualism, science fiction, and the environment. Wielding a rich palette of paint, glitter, ink, and glass beads, Nelson conjures landscapes that might be pre-human or post-apocalyptic, or from another planet altogether. Her invented images push back against a male-dominated tradition of landscape painting and question deeply rooted narratives of expansion, conquest, and extraction. A striking feature across her work is the vitality Nelson imbues in her landscapes; the land feels alive and dynamic throughout. Her innovative compositions and unconventional materials challenge and expand the boundaries of the genre, offering a different perspective on our relationship with the natural world.
…these are a blithe spirit’s fantasy landscapes, certain details of which have been rendered with the precision of a botanist. As in a dream, the details seem overparticularized and overfamiliar, but the whole is unfamiliar and ultimately alien.
–Donald Kuspit
Installation view of Joan Nelson, New Works; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR, April 6–May 18, 2024
Joan Nelson (b. 1958, El Segundo, CA; lives and works in Stamford, NY) has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; among many others. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, all New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Minneapolis Museum of Art, MN; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; and Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas at Austin. Nelson received her BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO.
Adams and Ollman exhibits and promotes contemporary art as well as historical works by self-taught artists of the 20th century. The gallery’s exhibitions seek to radically expand the discourse around contemporary art, bringing together a wide range of artistic practices, from self-taught masterworks to material culture to contemporary works in a variety of media. The gallery was founded in 2013 in Portland, Oregon.
Katherine Bradford
Mariel Capanna
James Castle
Vaginal Davis
Joy Feasley
Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Kinke Kooi
Jennifer Levonian
Rob Lyon
Ryan McLaughlin
Marlon Mullen
Joan Nelson
Todd Norsten
Conny Purtill
Will Rawls
Paul Swenbeck
Stefanie Victor