Danielle Orchard and Roberto Benavidez at the Perrotin Gallery, Los Angeles

Danielle Orchard: Firstborn

and

Roberto Benavidez: Bosch Beasts

Perrotin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

September 12 - October 18, 2025

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Text source: https://www.perrotin.com/

In Firstborn, Danielle Orchard’s lush, velvety paintings revel in the primal chaos of early motherhood—from gestation to childbirth and childrearing—offering deeply symbolic compositions that mine the spiritual, psychological, and corporeal complexities inherent to the nurturance of life. As discrete acts of material creation, painting and mothering here go hand in hand: each function as an embodied experience that necessitates a well of stamina and intuition, invariably redrawing the somatic boundaries of the practitioner.

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At Perrotin, Benavidez's piñatas are staged as if enacting their part in the central panel of Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1480–1505). In Bosch’s painting, groups of nude men and women dance, parade, and cavort in a raucous orgy of what an early-sixteenth-century viewer would have considered sinful excess and the reversal of the natural order. Bosch represents white and Black figures engaging in sexual contact, alongside people consorting with gargantuan birds. While in Bosch's work, the mixing of races and species signals a world lost to vice, Benavidez irreverently appropriates the Netherlandish artist’s avian iconography of sin and mixes it with his own visual vocabulary. Bosch Bird No. 11, originally engaged in the sensual act of feeding a berry to a waiting human recipient, now holds a piñata in its beak, while Bosch Beast No. 14 wears a black belt with seven spikes.