Marika Thunder Cotillion March 5 - April 16, 2022 Opening Reception: March 5 (4-8pm) de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Cotillion, the first solo exhibition in Los Angeles by New York based artist Marika Thunder. The exhibition consists of new figurative paintings continuing the artist’s practice of working with source and reference material from the artist’s own childhood. In this exhibition, Thunder presents oil paintings of young women performing for a Cotillion dress rehearsal. Working from photographs taken by the artist's mother, Thunder reproduces these images with a printer that has an ink cartridge missing. The spectrum of color then depicted by Thunder appears familiar yet abstract. In one painting, a performer is escorted across the stage in headdress and shorts, with a big American flag in the background projected on a jumbo screen. In another painting, a performer, painted in electric blue, does a full curtsy at the front of the stage. The formal relationship between color and form in these paintings suggest the question: What is familiar about etiquette classes that end with a final dinner-dance where proud parents gather to watch the participants show off their table manners, conversation etiquette, and dance moves? In Thunders paintings, this narrative suggests a distant and alienated feeling. This new series of paintings extends Thunder’s pursuit of revisiting experiences from the artist's own adolescence. By portraying performers, and even herself as a performer, Thunder carefully creates paintings that are slightly out of focus, a reduced realism that explores the profound experience of identity formation. Marika Thunder lives and works in New York, NY. Thunder’s paintings are often painted from photographs or collages from her own childhood. Invoking nostalgia with the twist of a critical lens. Thunder’s practice as a whole operates in a dance-like state between the fondness of a memory and critique. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as; Nino Mier, Los Angeles, CA; 56 Henry, New York; NY; Public Access, New York, NY; de boer, Los Angeles, CA and Half Gallery, NY. —---------- Allan Bennetts Popular Electronics March 5 - April 16, 2022 Opening Reception: March 5 (4-8pm) de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Popular Electronics, Allan Bennetts’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition consists of new oil paintings depicting consumer and trade specific electronic devices, on view in the east garden gallery March 5 - February 16, 2022. In this exhibition, Bennetts’ presents labor intensive still life paintings of vintage consumer products. Painted from direct observation, the paintings examine the varied positions consumer technologies occupy our collective and individual perception. By rebuilding these products as paintings, Bennetts moves the objects further from their former utilitarian function, shifting them into a new category of commodity. Bennetts’ paintings of objects share ideas with such artists as René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi, and Vija Celmins. Painted against neutral backgrounds, the carefulness of which they are made imbues them with a sympathetic humanity; awkward and silent. Exceedingly complex in organization, each painting poses varied positions the rendered object occupies in both collective and individual perception. The paintings are then elevated to a sense of timelessness, where the dimensionality depicted is in contrast to the flat picture plane. It is not a coincidence, that the rhetoric of a media driven society that influences every aspect of social life, including the arts, the preference for making paintings devoid of ideological and celebratory content is at the core of artist’s autonomy. From this perspective, the paintings emerge from a metaphysical space where the artist's poetic search grasps the profound through representational forms. The result is an accumulation of calibrated objects and shadows imbued with a broad cultural understanding and comprehensive knowledge of the tradition of painting. Allan Bennetts artworks take cues from painting traditions while simultaneously engaging in concepts inspired by contemporary pursuits. His laboriously detailed oil paintings depict common and trade specific electronics with a carefulness that imbues each object with a sympathetic humanity. Bennetts graduated from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. He has exhibited his work at venues such as Miles McEnery Gallery, New York; Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI, Forum Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI, and Miles McEnery, New York, NY. Bennetts is the recipient of 2019 Museum Purchase Award Nominee, Cranbrook Museum Of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.