Piper Bangs: Fruiting Body

Megan Mulrooney is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Piper Bangs. An inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s, Fruiting Body also marks Bangs’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Fruiting Body will feature a series of oil paintings on linen and watercolors on paper, and will be on view from September 14 – October 26, 2024.

In Bangs’ paintings, pears luxuriate across forest floors, pearls adorn limb-like branches, and grasses curl as though craning their necks toward imminent action. Flowers, fruit, and jewelry, conventional symbols of femininity, become grotesque and vivacious through Bangs’ hand: tree trunks curve like worms and the fleshy folds of pears swell across the compositions. Archetypes animate her landscape, from the Mentor Tree that swaddles its fruits to a cohort of pears extracting itself from the Tree’s cradle in pursuit of the outside world. Meanwhile, Fillettes, biomorphic and sperm-like green plants that function like voyeurs, watch the fruit from the paintings’ edges. A “fillette” is a French word for little girl, as well as—for Louise Bourgeois, whose work inspires Bangs—a flaccid penis: this sort of double entendre, both sweet and amusingly irreverent, encapsulates the tone of Bangs’ work. 

The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from botany, referring to the reproductive structures of fungi. For Bangs, this term suggests the wrinkled ripeness of the maturing pears; personifies the fruit as figures within the paintings, imbuing them with life and character; and alludes to the Mentor Tree, highlighting its role in producing and nurturing the fruit. 

Bangs’ biomorphic still lives, which partially draw from the naturalia of Impressionism, the ornamentation of the French Rococo, and the light strategies of the Dutch Golden Age, complicate the ethics and moralities often found within these historical referents. The sobering reminders of mortality embedded within Dutch still lives are shunted in favor of life in futurity, and erotic nudes of women bathing waterside are swapped for elevated representations of fleshy fruits bathed in moonlight. With the absence of the human figure, Bangs’ forms are able to act out an internal life. Her 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 dominant narratives of girlhood, gender, and sex. 

Piper Bangs (b. 2002 in San Antonio, TX; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter who earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting at Laguna College of Art and Design in Spring 2024. Bangs has had solo exhibitions at The Watermill Center in Watermill, NY and was recently an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. She has exhibited her work in venues such as Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York, NY, The Pit in Palm Springs, CA, Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami, FL, and the Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio, TX, among others.