Bernadette Despujols‘ practice encompasses sculpture, video, and installation, but is primarily focused on figurative painting to explore her experiences of intimacy and feminine embodiment. Women, girls, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and friends are displayed in all of their bodily extremity, slightness, beauty and tenderness. Her surfaces tend to be heavily worked, filled with frenetic brushstrokes that vacillate between impasto and stark retraction. In some areas, her paint has been eroded to the point that the underpainting is visible, giving a topographical quality to her portraits. She has said of her work: “I want to explore the vast ocean in which the woman swims [...] one that goes way beyond those absurd expectations of what women should be.”