About the Artist
About the Artist:
Anne Bedrick is a sculptor and painter who lives in Palm Springs and works from a warehouse studio in Cathedral City, California. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan and spent a full year studying studio art at the Syracuse University Program in Florence, Italy. Her work is included in the rare book collection of the University of Virginia and has been acquired by over 160 private collectors. It has also been exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions, including shows juried by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and MOCA Los Angeles.
Bedrick co-founded Desert Open Studios, an annual open-studio tour supporting over 150 artists, and helped establish both the Modernism Week Art District Tour and the monthly art walks in the Perez Art District, where her studio is located.
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Artist Statement:
Across my work in painting and sculpture, hands recur as a central symbol—reaching, pulling, protecting, claiming. They are how the world touches us and how we touch each other.
Working from my warehouse studio in Greater Palm Springs, my freestanding figurative cement sculptures exist in psychological exchange with one another and with the viewer. I pose armatures, sometimes with figures reaching across multiple bases, sometimes with multiple figures on one base, and sometimes with figures completely alone. I move the armatures, adjusting gestures and hands until they tell a story. I then build with steel, tinfoil, and fiber-reinforced cement, allowing each layer to bring the figure further into itself. In Woman-Spreading, for example, I initially hung the armature on the wall, but as I built it up, her comfort in her own body became more expressive. Her spread legs, tilted head, and tossed hand all serve her experience; she is oblivious to the discomfort her pose may cause the viewer.
My paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. I work with water-thinned acrylic, guiding it into the shapes of bodies and then allowing the pigment to settle into unexpected passages that reimagine how a figure can be rendered. I often leave passages raw, highlighting the surprises, splashes, and irregular forms the pigment creates, trusting the viewer’s eye to read the bodies. I add drawn elements using tempera sticks that further express what each painting is about.
In recent paintings such as Sometimes, Wait, Me Too, and Half Remembered, I explore the unstable space between connection and separation. Figures reach toward one another, protect one another, or long to belong, while remaining psychologically separate. The paintings consider how we can be deeply connected to another person and still experience the same moment very differently.
Together, my paintings and sculptures explore human connection, vulnerability, and the traces we leave on one another—the weight of hands, felt long after they have lifted.