Whitney Bedford: Nocturnes

Opening Reception: Friday, September 11, 5–8 PM

SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to announce a solo presentation by Los Angeles-based gallery artist Whitney Bedford. Titled Nocturnes, this exhibition will feature a suite of new paintings centered around Bedford's Veduta series exploring the conceptual and figurative notion of midnight. This exhibition is presented concurrently with … before the dawn, an curated survey featuring a group of artists exploring our complex relationship with the celestial. Both exhibitions open Friday, September 11 from 5–8 PM at SECRIST | BEACH and remains on view through November 14, 2026.

While this is the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist, Nocturnes presents the first exhibition of the newest iteration of Bedford’s acclaimed Veduta series, which has been ongoing since 2019. These moonscapes mark a natural progression from her previous body of work which featured sunsets, some of which were created in the aftermath of the devastating 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. In this transition from day to night, Bedford introduces a new chromatic register, transforming the atmospheric qualities of the Veduta series from muted luminosity to the heightened ambiguity of moonlit landscapes. The resulting works constitute a subtle yet striking evolution of the artist’s ongoing engagement with light, atmosphere and the moods they evoke.    

Veduta paintings are a genre of painting made popular throughout the 16th to 18th centuries. Originally, these highly detailed depictions of recognizable European vistas were coveted by land-owning patrons, appealing to their sense of locality and pride of place. Significantly, this genre also captured imagery of healthy and pristine vistas untouched by development, pollution and other man-made blight. Seeing what the world looked like through this artistic lens in the 1600s is an eye-opening assessment of the complicated relationship between humanity and nature. Change, as an evolutionary constant depicted through art and across time, becomes a subtle meditation on our moral responsibility to the natural world.

As Vedute evolved through shifting art-historical paradigms - from Impressionism to Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism - the landscape remained recognizably the same while becoming increasingly sensorial. Artists turned to intensified color and expressive brushwork in their pursuit of the sublime. Edmund Burke defined the sublime as an artistic effect capable of producing “the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling,” particularly through that which evokes fear of the unknown. This evolution marked a shift from quaint pastoral depictions of the countryside toward more evocative, moody, and dramatic phenomenologies.

Bedford’s new series of Veduta paintings consists entirely of moonlit landscapes and seascapes that embrace the essence of the sublime while situating the series within a specific moment in time: darkness. Inspired by masterworks by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Milton Avery, Camille Pissarro, and Frederic Edwin Church as underpaintings, Bedford layers vivid neon-colored tree and cacti motifs, many native to her Southern Californian environs. A third element introduces an architectural gesture: a three-quarter view of an interior room defined by a floor, back wall, and hints of two adjoining walls. Together, the underpainting, neon flora, and architectural framework draw the viewer into an intimate, immersive space, enhancing the experience of the sublime.

With Nocturnes, the moon becomes both protagonist and antagonist—amplified by the characteristics of being moody and dramatic—while also playing the role of guide, existential muse and keeper of time.  Long burdened with symbolic and emotional meaning across art, literature, music, and mythology, it appears here as something more detached: an omnipresent witness. Absorbing centuries of the human experience as we move firmly into the Age of the Anthropocene, Nocturnes are presented on a stage in dialogue with the scenic past revealing the friction and the disconnect between the past and present landscapes.

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Within Nocturnes, Secrist Beach presents eleven paintings from Whitney Bedford’s new body of work Leda and the Swan, featuring reinterpretations of a single painting—itself an interpretive work—Luigi Mussini’s Leda and the Swan (1840–1850). The subject, drawn from Greek mythology, has been rendered repeatedly over centuries in painting, sculpture, poetry, and numerous other artistic forms. Depicting the seduction of Leda by the Greek god Zeus, who appears in the form of a swan, the enduring popularity of the myth lends itself to the charged erotic atmosphere of the scene.

Mussini’s version is striking in its detail, form, and execution, resulting in a sensual painting that serves as a constant throughout Bedford’s versions. Her return to this single composition amplifies her interest in repetition as a method: how reiteration alters meaning, and how art history and personal narrative converge through the mechanics of reproduction. Through repetition, the painting ceases to function as a fixed mythological scene and instead becomes a stage for transition across centuries of art history, shifting notions of mastery and originality, and the personal narratives that emerge through sustained return. In this way, the image heightens the visibility of change—whether formal, conceptual, or biographical.

Whitney Bedford (lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles, CA. Bedford’s work has been included in group exhibitions at international institutions including the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Galerie de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Quimper, France; Hôtel de Ville, Pont-Aven, France; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA.

Her work is included in the collections of Eric Decelle, Brussels, Belgium; Francois Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Ginette Moulin and Guillaume Houzé Contemporary Art Collection, Paris, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Jumex Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz Collection, Miami, FL; Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA, among others. She is the recipient of awards including the Pollock Krasner Award; New York, NY, UCLA D’Arcy Hayman Award, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; UCLA Hammer Museum Drawing Biennial Winner, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Fulbright Graduate Fellowship, Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, Germany; Karl-Hofer Gesellschaft Atelier, Künstlerwerkstatt Bahnhof Westend; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Studentship, Venice, Italy.