Title
Round
Oil on canvas
44 x 61 x 2 inches
Estimated Value Range:
$5,000 - $8,000
Starting Bid: $2,000
Bidding increments: $250
Despite its dark composition, there is much at play in this dramatic painting. A cast of characters in the foreground–hinted at through gestures of bright color–suggest various tales that might occur under the moonlight.
Angela Dufresne is a Brooklyn-based painter whose vivid, narrative works fuse expressive abstraction with allegorical storytelling, often delivered through an unapologetically queer and feminist lens. Her flamboyant canvases explore themes of desire, identity, and transformation, populating chaotic, dreamlike spaces with hybrid beings, film stars, and mythological figures. With a fearless mix of humor, theatricality, and sensuality, Dufresne creates expansive painterly worlds that challenge dominant historical and cinematic narratives.
Dufresne’s 2021 solo exhibition, Long and Short Shots, was held at Vielmetter Los Angeles. Writing for Artforum, critic Colin Edgington described it as “a vision of a soft but salacious utopia full of unabashed living and endless love… Her phantasmagoric imagery calls to mind dreams, memories, and hallucinations. And like these psychic phenomena, her work feels as if it is forever undefinable, transitional—that is, utterly free.”
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Angela Dufresne
Artist Statement
"My work exists in frenzied, psychologically charged spaces of conflict and resolution, inspired by a bygone era of Hollywood glamour and heightened drama. More closely aligned with a tradition of cinema than painting, space in my compositions is constantly in motion. My figures exist in a dreamlike realm between the silver screen and the more enigmatic off-screen sites of unbridled imagination and risk-laden adventures.
Desire is central—to be wanted, recognized, taken. My uninhibited use of color, gestural brushstrokes, and layers of painted imagery hints at an internal pathos in each painting, laying fertile ground for operatic drama, queer imagining, and a radical undoing of familiar narratives.
Many of my works reference canonical history painting and cinema but often upend the heroic narratives that have dominated each genre. Bodies frolic in promiscuous and cross-species fraternity, populating a painterly realm that is part psychedelic dreamscape, part mythical neverland. I revisit iconic vignettes from classic cinema, inserting lesbian imagery, distorted starlet likenesses, and hybridized bodies to offer alternative readings—flipping dominant attitudes toward women and queerness and spinning liberated reimaginings of cultural, sexual, and social exchange."
Biography
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1969, Angela Dufresne received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1998. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards and residencies, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Siena Art Institute Residency, Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, and the Jerome Foundation Fellowship.
Dufresne’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO), and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (SUNY New Paltz). Her paintings have also been featured in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the RISD Museum, and the Rose Art Museum, among many others.
Collections and Recognition
Her work is held in numerous public and private collections and has been widely reviewed in national and international publications. Dufresne continues to push the boundaries of narrative painting, creating spaces where queerness, theatricality, and painterly pleasure collapse into one another with joyful, radical freedom.
