Piper Bangs b. 2002, Texas, US

Piper Bangs’ paintings dwell in a world between waking life and dreaming: pears undulate like bodies, plants twirl around a formal dining table, and cockroaches cower in the shadow of lipsticks. Within this evolving world, Bangs’ anthropomorphic fruit become anonymous figures through which she explores intimacy, desire, vulnerability, and the emotional complexities of interpersonal relationships. Flowers, fruit, and clothing, each a symbol of traditional femininity, become grotesque and vivacious under Bangs’ gaze: cut orchids curve at unnatural angles, and pears grow abnormally large stems, their fleshy folds swelling across the canvas.

Bangs’ biomorphic still lives, which draw from both the splendors of the French Rococo and the refinement of the Dutch Golden Age, complicate the moralizing tone of these historical referents. Instead, Bangs’ compositions morph the restrictive visual metaphors of previous painters—like Renoir, who famously remarked that his “goal in painting the nude is to paint them as beautiful fruit”—into multivalent, resilient objects that disrupt the confines of gender, sex, and so-called polite society. 

Piper Bangs (b. 2002 in San Antonio, TX; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) holds a BFA in Drawing and Painting at Laguna College of Art and Design. Bangs has had solo exhibitions at HdM Gallery, Beijing, CN, Megan Mulrooney, Los Angeles, CA, and The Watermill Center in Watermill, NY, and was recently an artist in residence at the Mack Art Foundation. Her work is included in the Taschen Collection; The Watermill Center, NY, US; the Lowell Milken Center for Unsung Heroes, Fort Scott, KS; the Holdsworth Center, Austin, TX; the Bunker Collection, West Palm Beach, Florida; and the Sehwa Museum Collection, Seoul, South Korea.