Studio Visit with
Beaux Mendes
Studio Visit with
Beaux Mendes

Beaux Mendes was born in 1987 in New York. Rooted in materiality and the direct observation of nature, their fragmentary and abstract works are animated by latent apparitional figures. Their work treats painting as a transitory medium, while consistently revealing the physical qualities of the used support. Involving rituals of passage and pilgrimage, their practice invites estrangement and altered states of experience resulting from repeated trips to sites for painting, often remote and obscure. These sites conjure a relay of sensory information and embedded imagery that phase between environment and artist, generating a range of phenomena recorded by way of an artwork as conduit. As such, appearances arrive as much as they withdraw, opening spaces of irresolution. The visual effect of their work is to manifest a unique and reflexive threshold of in-betweenness, a shifting sense of positionality always bordering on transgression. Situated within the different configurations proposed by Mendes’s paintings lies the crux of their poetics: an image is a kind of transference, its nature is never wholly perceptible, let alone conceivable—apprehension is a balancing act on changing, uncertain ground.



Recent solo exhibitions include Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2024, 2022); Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2023); and STARS Gallery, Los Angeles (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Secession Vienna (2026); ProjecteSD, Barcelona (2025); High Art, Paris (2025); 15th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2024); MAMOTH, London (2024); Derosia, New York (2024); DREI, Cologne (2023); Tureen, Dallas (2023); and Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York (2022). Mendes earned a BA at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT (2010), and MFAs from the University of California, Los Angeles (2019), and Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2021).