The Swiss Institute in New York has opened a new exhibition titled “De Anima,” pairing sculptor Elizabeth King and painter Louise Bonnet. Curated by director Stefanie Hessler, the show explores the boundaries between the living and the lifelike, featuring King's intricate automata and stop-motion films alongside Bonnet's large-scale oil paintings of fleshy, gestural figures. The artists, introduced by Hessler at an opening last year, discovered a shared fascination with involuntary bodily movements—twitching eyes, clenched jaws—and the invisible labor of artistic craftsmanship.
The exhibition matters because it brings together two generations of artists working in different media—sculpture and painting—who find common ground in the anatomy of gesture and the physicality of making art. Their dialogue challenges the mainstream art world's emphasis on intellectual content and political messaging, instead foregrounding the tactile, labor-intensive process of creation. The show also highlights the Swiss Institute's role in fostering unexpected curatorial pairings that reveal deeper artistic kinships.