Over the course of a year, Artnet’s writers and journalists speak to hundreds of artists. Sometimes, those conversations linger in our minds for months, even years, after our articles have been published. Our weekly column “Up Next” spotlights emerging artists and allows us to highlight fresh perspectives and intriguing practices that we think you should know.
Looking back over the dozens of emerging artist profiles we published this year, we’ve homed in on five that for one reason or another, we keep returning to.
Piper Bangs Just Graduated From College. Now Her Fantastical Fruit Paintings Are Captivating the Art World
Emerging artist Piper Bangs only recently (very recently, just this past May) graduated from the Laguna College of Art and Design where she studied painting and drawing, but her career is already hitting its stride. In 2022, she opened her first solo show at the Watermill Center in New York, “Flora,” which was followed early last year by another solo, “Flora II,” in a collaboration between the Watermill Center and Estia’s Little Kitchen in Sag Harbor. This fall, the Los Angeles-based artist made her hometown debut with “Piper Bangs: Fruiting Body,” a solo show at the newly established Megan Mulrooney Gallery. Ahead of that debut, Annikka Olsen spoke with Bangs about her paintings, in which fruits (often pears) are rendered with a sentient agency.
“They are at times, frankly, a bit gross to look at, but at others rather cute,” Olsen said. These paintings are fleshy and organic and fantastical, a vision of life that is both alien and familiar. These paintings have also captivated audiences. “It’s important to me that the paintings are also open-ended enough, that people can come to them and imagine what’s going on in different ways,” said Bangs, in conversation.
