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 150 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 Palm Springs, CA,my cement figurative sculptures exist in psychological exchange with one another and with the viewer. Their gestures and facial expressions move between tenderness and confrontation. Elongated bodies and painted surfaces heighten that tension. Each carries a felt intensity in their body that the viewer feels in their own.
In The Observer, a figure watches, seemingly bound by painted lines, unable to act - and notably without hands. In Holding Onto That Feeling, a figure presses her hands to her heart, head tilted back, overwhelmed - the painted flush beneath her palms marking the body’s response to joy too large to contain, a moment of love so complete she must hold it in place. In Look, I’m Gonna Eat It, my depiction of Adam and Eve, Eve holds all the agency. The figures are fused down the center, appearing to share a leg and an arm, but, both belong to her. She is determined and ready to take the step. He is uncertain, literally standing on one leg, looking to her for direction.
My paintings hover between figuration and abstraction, navigating inner and outer experience. Their scale envelops the viewer, insisting on the physical experience of standing before them. Figures emerge and dissolve at the edge of abstraction, their instability echoed in fractured spaces.
In The Imprint of People, I examine how the memory of others continues to shape us long after they are gone. In Paid No Attention, a small child plays dress-up, hoping to be noticed while the chaos of the adult world gathers around her. In She Was Me, a 96-inch diptych, a woman consumed by the hands of others reaches across time toward the girl that she once was.
Fall of Freedom: Women’s Testimonies is a series of five paintings bearing witness to women’s experience of the current erosion of rights and bodily autonomy. In Unhand Me, the body asserts its own boundaries against an unwanted claim. In Woman on the Run, Woman in Pieces, Woman Becoming Warrior, and Can You Hear the People Sing, the arc moves from flight through fracture through transformation toward collective voice. They are not hopeful paintings. They are honest ones.
Recent abstract paintings introduce large, vaguely animal forms hovering like clouds, carrying the emotional weight of the present moment without settling into narrative. These are feelings given form: emotional states made visible before language can organize them.
Together, my paintings and sculptures form an ongoing inquiry into human connection, vulnerability, and the traces we leave on one another - the weight of hands, felt long after they have lifted.