Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (1) - 2023

Lou Benesch’s 2023 exhibitions Untamed Splendor at Antler Gallery demonstrates the artist’s commitment to reimagining familiar subjects such as animals, plants, and food as symbolic carriers of narrative. Painted in luminous, jewel-toned watercolours, Benesch’s works operate between naturalistic study and allegorical fable. They are not simply depictions of deer, birds, or fruit, but visual devices that suggest myth, memory, and collective imagination.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (2) - 2023

The use of watercolour is significant here. Historically aligned with fragility, domesticity, or amateur practice, watercolour has often been considered secondary to oil painting within Western art hierarchies. Benesch’s practice disrupts this narrative, pushing the medium into the realm of the monumental through scale, precision, and symbolism. In this way, the work resonates with Glenn Adamson’s assertion in Thinking Through Craft (2007) that so-called “lesser” materials and processes can destabilise established value systems in art.

This has direct relevance to my own MFA practice. Like Benesch, I draw on materials and visual languages that have been culturally coded as “decorative” or “feminine” and explore how they can carry narrative weight. Benesch’s approach reinforces my interest in the symbolic potential of ornament, and in the possibility of elevating whimsical or hyper-feminine motifs into vehicles for mythic or cultural storytelling.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (3) - 2023

What I take from these exhibitions is not only Benesch’s use of imagery, but also her strategic engagement with material histories. By transforming watercolour into a medium of intensity and authority, she demonstrates how artists can reclaim undervalued processes as critical, contemporary strategies.

Lou Benesch - Untamed Splendor (4) - 2023