Paul Brach Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Bernadette Despujols was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. She studied Architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), where she graduated with honors. Soon after, she continued her education at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she took classes in architecture, cultural exchange, morphology and anatomy before beginning her endeavors in art making. Despujols taught Architectonic Design at the School of Architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela before moving to the US to pursue her MFA in Visual Arts at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). With an artistic practice is expansive, as she incorporates a wide range of different media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation, her current work revolves and questions historical allusions, myths and references regarding the perception of women, sex and contemporary life. Despujols works with a diverse variety of materials, scales and strategies, intervening and assembling objects, working in small format paintings or large participatory sculptures, which complete an acute body of work that questions gender, the perception of women by society and themselves. She questions intimacy and the idea that the world in which we live now revolves around sex. Bernadette Despujols examines from a variety of perspectives many, deeply ingrained cultural practices associated with attempts to define contemporary womanhood.
Her work encompasses nuances and subtleties that revolve around the cultural perception of women about themselves: guilt trips, social expectations, sexual desire as well as intimate bodily connections and thoughts. It also explores the perception that womanhood is somehow always connected with some kind of guilt and draws a fine line between sardonic humor and sheer abjection. She shares her time between her architectural firm and her art practice, and lives and works between New York and Miami. Her work has been featured in several exhibitions in galleries and museums, including the Arts+Leisure and the LVL3 Gallery and is featured in Two Coats Online Art Guide: Spring 2020, a piece from the Two Coats of Paint in 2020.
All lectures are free, open to the public, and presented online.
To register, please email artvals@alum.calarts.edu with the subject RSVP PBVALS.