PARIS.- Perrotin Paris is pleased to present Distant Cities, Kelly Beeman’s first solo exhibition in France, and her third with the gallery (Seoul, 2022; New York, 2023). The exhibition features three new oil paintings and twenty works on paper, including monochromatic ink paintings—a medium she has recently begun exploring.
In Kelly Beeman’s work, life flows serenely. Young girls bask in the tranquility of North American parks and gardens. Nature is idyllic, and nothing seems to disturb the peace of the languid protagonists. Singing, playing the piano, lying on beds or lush patches of grass, striking a pose on a shopping street, or holding a bouquet of white flowers, these girls inhabit a world of serenity, luxury, and pleasure.
Yet we know that the “real” world is very different, marred by aggression, violence, tension, and war, leaving little room for relaxation and personal well-being. Beeman’s vision is a Platonic ideal, depicting the world not as it is but as it should be. Over time, she began to diminish the emphasis on individuality in her subjects, perceiving them as components of a singular entity. Currently, the only distinguishing features among these figures are their attire, scale—such as the smaller stature of the little girl compared to others—and occasionally, gender, particularly when depicting romantic relationships. She posits that the world encapsulated within her work might exclude individual experience portraying it instead as an idealized realm of flawless, seamless connectivity. In this envisioned space, the notion of internal conflict or tension within individuals seems incongruous.
The history of art is full of recurring faces. Beeman’s work recalls the soft, elongated features and intense gaze of the woman who haunted Sandro Botticelli’s paintings. Like Petrarch’s Laure or Dante’s Beatrice, this enigmatic woman, who utterly captivated the painter, embodies the feminine ideal. Yet there are also echoes of Amedeo Modigliani’s angelic faces with their vacant, soul-searching eyes, as well as the pre-Raphaelite paintings of Rossetti and Burne-Jones.
The exhibition is titled Distant Cities. Many works contain architectural elements that serve as reassuring and threatening settings for Beeman’s figures. The city is presented as a metaphor for a future that may not necessarily be bright and from which we try to escape despite the apparent calmness of the scenes. Our relationship with this future becomes more than ambivalent, at times frightening, at times exciting. A smaller figure symbolizes the movement back and forth in time. The artist says, "She’s a younger version of the ’others.' Sometimes, they seem to protect her. Elsewhere, she appears to be running away, and they try to dissuade her... I often think about time, experience, and that strange feeling of discontinuity that we sometimes have in life, especially during experiences of trauma and loss. Some of the paintings in this exhibition are more memory than fiction, but the line is quite blurred".
Beeman’s work is defined by its clear lines, which are highly graphic and meticulously arranged. Everything in her universe is in its place; even the flight of birds in the sky seems to follow a precise, preordained path. However, one feels that even a minor disruption could create chaos in this well-oiled machine, creating a sense of both solidity and fragility.
The paintings have the delicacy of painted silk and the smoothness of marble inlays. Yet they exude a certain coldness, keeping us at arm’s length. There’s something old-fashioned about them, as though they had been painted in a bygone era—as if a major catastrophe had reshuffled the cards, turning the works into signals from another world. As the artist aptly says, "Sometimes they wish time would stand still."
