Via Vincenzo Monti 32
Milan 20123
Milan 20123
Wizard Gallery presents Quarantine the Past, Todd Bienvenu’s first exhibition with the gallery, on view from March 10 through April 10, 2026.
The exhibition brings together three new acrylic paintings—Summer babes, Freak scene, and Voyeur (all 2026)—each centered on scenes of collective presence and solitary regard. Figures gather in a crowded swimming pool; a young adult is carried horizontally across a concert audience; a lone observer stands before a lit building at night. In each work, multiple bodies and perspectives are compressed into a tightly organized pictorial space.
Rather than unfolding as narrative episodes, these scenes are presented as deliberately constructed images. Gesture, mass, and architectural framing structure the compositions, while passages of light—reflected water, stage illumination, window glow—define spatial relationships and direct attention. The density of the painted surface reinforces the sense of proximity, holding figures and ground in sustained tension.
The title, Quarantine the Past, suggests a measured distance: moments of collective intensity are neither nostalgically revived nor dismissed, but isolated and examined. Across these works, Bienvenu continues his sustained engagement with figuration as a means of translating lived experience into formal structure. The exhibition underscores painting’s capacity to contain, reframe, and materially fix scenes of shared encounter within a self-sufficient visual field.
Todd Bienvenu (b. 1980, Little Rock, Arkansas) lives and works in New York. He is known for expressive, densely worked paintings that explore scenes of collective experience, intimacy, and spectatorship. Working primarily in oil and acrylic, Bienvenu builds his compositions through layered accumulation and revision, allowing figures to emerge from saturated, chromatically complex surfaces. His work often draws from everyday and subcultural environments—pools, concerts, urban spaces—where humor, vulnerability, and physical presence intersect within tightly constructed pictorial fields.
