Anne Bedrick

Lives and works in Cathedral City, CA

Artist statement

Across my work in painting and sculpture, hands recur as a central symbol—reaching, pulling, protecting, claiming. They are how the world touches us and how we touch each other. Working from my warehouse studio in Greater Palm Springs, my freestanding figurative cement sculptures exist in psychological exchange with one another and with the viewer. I pose armatures, sometimes with figures reaching across multiple bases, sometimes with multiple figures on one base, and sometimes with figures completely alone. I move the armatures, adjusting gestures and hands until they tell a story. I then build with steel, tinfoil, and fiber-reinforced cement, allowing each layer to bring the figure further into itself. In Woman-Spreading, for example, I initially hung the armature on the wall, but as I built it up, her comfort in her own body became more expressive. Her spread legs, tilted head, and tossed hand all serve her experience; she is oblivious to the discomfort her pose may cause the viewer. My paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. I work with water-thinned acrylic, guiding it into the shapes of bodies and then allowing the pigment to settle into unexpected passages that reimagine how a figure can be rendered. I often leave passages raw, highlighting the surprises, splashes, and irregular forms the pigment creates, trusting the viewer’s eye to read the bodies. I add drawn elements using tempera sticks that further express what each painting is about. In recent...

Artwork