Genesis Belanger — Born 1978, Massachusetts. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Represented by Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and Perrotin, Paris/New York/Seoul/Tokyo/Hong Kong/Shanghai.

 

Genesis Belanger’s oddball surrealist sculptures speak to some of life’s most unsettling realities while blurring the boundaries of art and design. Her work is characterized by the treatment of objects as surrogates for the body. Sculpted in porcelain and concrete and tinted in fondant hues, everyday objects take on human features, made uncomfortably familiar as they begin to resemble us. Belanger’s still life sculptures — compositions of furniture, fruit, and flowers loaded with signs and symbols — are increasingly contextualized by their surroundings, psychologically charged spaces created by the artist. The effect is uncanny, toeing the line between comfort and disquiet, the beautiful and the strange. 

 

Belanger’s work is strongly informed by her early design experience. Born in Massachusetts and raised by hippie parents, Belanger was influenced by the “weird art” her father made in their garage. Belanger received her BFA in fashion from the School at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and worked for a year in the industry before realizing she liked designing the booth for a fashion fair more than the clothes themselves. That led to work in advertising as a prop stylist for campaigns – often selling ideas of female allure. Skilled with the choreography but ultimately disillusioned by the content, Belanger left the business after several years to get her MFA at Hunter College in Combined Media in 2012. “I wanted to be the mastermind of my world, for my own ends,” she says.

 

In 2019 Belanger created an installation in the New Museum’s Storefront Window, in New York. In 2020, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, presented her first solo exhibition at a major US museum. In 2021, Belanger is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France.