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Almine Rech

Todd Bienvenu Halcyon Days

Jun 19 — Aug 8, 2020 | Shanghai
Inquire about the exhibition: inquiries@alminerech.com

Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present Halcyon Days, an exhibition of recent work by American artist Todd Bienvenu, on view from June 19 to August 8, 2020.

What do our memories look like now the future has disappeared? The risks and rewards of physical life have seldom seemed so far away, freighted with a new kind of yearning and anxiety. In these days of contagion – intimacy now our enemy, paranoia shadowing human contact – we’re stranded in a culture whose nostalgia now serves a survivalist cause. Never has satire seemed more useless, or a real-estate reality TV vulgarian for president so incoherently lethal.

In ‘Halcyon Days’, Todd Bienvenu resurrects a fragile world of touch and sensation, of people drawn together and forced apart – all experienced through the longing and loneliness of having a body.

A guy crowd-surfs in a moshpit, held aloft by a sea of hands. The paint looks nimble, energetically applied, mimicking the hazy abandon of the crowd. (Remember them?) A Courtney Love-a-like, her mouth lipsticked scarlet, plays a bright yellow Fender onstage. Collective energy seems radical – the opposite of lockdown’s entropic drift – and yet impossibly utopian, swept away by enforced isolation.

Motion, conveyed in thick, giddy brushstrokes, becomes a forgotten – and self-forgetting – pleasure. A couple pillow fight on their bed, the woman’s midriff poking from her crop top. Is this a brief moment of quarantined bliss? Or lovers gone stir crazy? Elsewhere, we see a tropical beach with a woman peeling off her top; a waterpark as a monument to longed-for, brainless fun. You can almost hear the bright laughter shading into melancholy, imagined now from four white walls.

Technology becomes an impostor of intimacy. A woman lies flat on her bed, lit in the muted glow of her laptop. A closely cropped canvas shows a man holding up his smartphone, his features ghosted by the same ambient wash of murky blues and aquamarines. Stuck in different time zones or trying to reach each other from elsewhere, our romance with technology offers its own dangerous seductions: a virtual connection perhaps easier than the real thing.

Press release

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Selected artworks

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Yogi, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Yogi, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    66 x 50.8 cm
    26 x 20 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Soccer own goal, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Soccer own goal, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    193 x 170.2 cm
    76 x 67 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Pillow Fight, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Pillow Fight, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    193 x 170.2 cm
    76 x 67 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Bike for two, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Bike for two, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    193 x 170.2 cm
    76 x 67 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Bike Scorpion, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Bike Scorpion, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    61 x 53.3 cm
    24 x 21 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Fancy hotel view, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Fancy hotel view, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    27.9 x 35.6 cm
    11 x 14 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Wedgie, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Wedgie, 2020

    Oil on wood
    30.5 x 30.5 cm
    12 x 12 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Bass face, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Bass face, 2020

    Oil on wood
    30.5 x 30.5 cm
    12 x 12 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Beach view, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Beach view, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    109.2 x 91.4 cm
    43 x 36 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Wild river country, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Wild river country, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    193 x 170.2 cm
    76 x 67 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Self isolating, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Self isolating, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    35.6 x 27.9 cm
    14 x 11 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Self isolating 2, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Self isolating 2, 2020

    Oil on wood
    35.6 x 45.7 cm
    14 x 18 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      sk8r, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu sk8r, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    30.5 x 22.9 cm
    12 x 9 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Crowd surfing, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Crowd surfing, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    94 x 106.7 cm
    37 x 42 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Rough housing, 2019

    Todd Bienvenu Rough housing, 2019

    Acrylic on canvas
    61 x 53.3 cm
    24 1/8 x 21 in

  • Todd Bienvenu,                                      Rockaway beach, 2020

    Todd Bienvenu Rockaway beach, 2020

    Oil on canvas
    61 x 53.3 cm
    24 1/8 x 21 in