What We Carry Becomes the Terrain: by Bénédicte Gimonnet

"This exhibition pushes my exploration of identity, memory and what we carry within us further, as well as my ongoing attempt to understand the emotional resonance of transient places and the unstable sense of belonging when you do not live in your homeland. What we carry shapes our psychological and geographical environments, and those environments, in turn, shape us." - Bénédicte Gimonnet

Gimonnet’s expansive body of work investigates the implications of inhabiting hybrid geographies, cultures and inherited histories within the confines of a single self. The exhibition returns to this question, holding multiplicity open to enquiry: its consequences, resistances and indistinguishable traces. Drawn together across painting, drawing and textile, the works constitute a sustained interrogation of plurality, one in which difficulty and possibility remain, throughout,

inseparable.

Gimonnet's paintings are built through unconventional combinations of colour and material, brought together into environments that immerse rather than simply depict. For over a decade, this technical experimentation has dissolved the boundary between what lies within a person and what surrounds them, where landscape manifests as a register of the psychological.

This body of work returns to hybridity of landscape and identities again and again, treating it as a puzzle to be continually reckoned with. Memory, place and imagination accumulate upon one another, without ever arriving at a final resolution.

This exhibition follows Gimonnet's presentation at Abu Dhabi Art (2024) and her earlier solo exhibition In Search of Eden (2023). It builds upon Echoes of Eden (2025), her recent solo exhibition at the Municipal and Cultural Palace in Lima, Peru.

This body of work returns to hybridity of landscape and identities again and again, treating it as a puzzle to be continually reckoned with. Memory, place and imagination accumulate upon one another, without ever arriving at a final resolution.

This exhibition follows Gimonnet's presentation at Abu Dhabi Art (2024) and her earlier solo exhibition In Search of Eden (2023). It builds upon Echoes of Eden (2025), her recent solo exhibition at the Municipal and Cultural Palace in Lima, Peru.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bénédicte Gimonnet paints immersive rainforest environments in which extravagant vegetation acts as an allegory for the mind. The surfaces come from mixing supposedly unmixable painting materials, and the colour references Peruvian folklore rather than observed nature. Her compositions are deliberately not botanically, geographically or seasonally correct. The work follows Gimonnet's reconciliation with her Peruvian roots and treats landscape as a record of identity rather than a place. Gimonnet was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in 1969 and has worked in the UAE for over thirteen years. Her solo exhibition Echoes of Eden was held at the Municipal and Cultural Palace, Peru, in 2025, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Lima.