Artist Statement/ Biography

Despujols works with a diverse variety of materials, scales and strategies, intervening and assembling objects, working in small format paintings or large participatory sculptures, which complete an acute body of work that questions gender, the perception of women by society and themselves. Despujols questions intimacy and the idea that the world in which we live now revolves around sex. Bernadette Despujols examine from a variety of perspectives many, deeply ingrained cultural practices associated with attempts to define contemporary womanhood. In this vein, the quest to find the answer to the question of how a woman, by virtue of being a woman, makes others uncomfortable seems to be one of the central tenets explored by her body of work.

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Bernadette Despujols was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. She studied Architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), where she graduated with honors in 2007. Soon after, she continued her education at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where took classes in architecture, cultural exchange, morphology and anatomy before beginning her endeavors in art making. Despujols taught Architectonic Design at the School of Architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela before moving to the US to pursue her MFA in Visual Arts at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in 2010. Despujols’ artistic practice is highly expansive, as she incorporates a wide range of different media, including painting, sculpture, video and installation.