Angela Dufresne ('91 Painting)
Fine Artist
Using humor and over-the-top sensuality, Angela Dufresne creates narrative paintings that depict absurdist allegories of perversion and debauchery. Dufrense received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1998, and she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2016. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, the Hammer Museum, and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. At once recalling history painting, Italian Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, Dufresne’s paintings skillfully merge abstract and figurative elements by layering transparent and outlined forms atop fluid, gestural backgrounds.
Her loose brushwork lends her canvases a montage-like sense of movement and a chaotic beauty. Borrowing imagery from mythology, film, art history, and pop culture, she creates fantastical tableaux populated by queer lovers, hybrid beasts, and film stars. Amalgams of aesthetic and historical references, Dufresne’s paintings engage with histories of visual storytelling and cultural production as well as contemporary queer and feministdiscourses.