While this is the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist, Nocturnes presents the first exhibition of the newest iteration of Bedford’s acclaimed Veduta series, which has been ongoing since 2019. These moonscapes mark a natural progression from her previous body of work which featured sunsets, some of which were created in the aftermath of the devastating 2025 Palisades Fire in Los Angeles. In this transition from day to night, Bedford introduces a new chromatic register, transforming the atmospheric qualities of the Veduta series from muted luminosity to the heightened ambiguity of moonlit landscapes. The resulting works constitute a subtle yet striking evolution of the artist’s ongoing engagement with light, atmosphere and the moods they evoke.

Veduta paintings are a genre of painting made popular throughout the 16th to 18th centuries. Originally, these highly detailed depictions of recognizable European vistas: significantly, this genre also captured imagery of healthy and pristine vistas untouched by development, pollution and other man-made blight. Seeing what the world looked like through this artistic lens in the 1600s is an eye-opening assessment of the complicated relationship between humanity and nature.

Bedford’s new series of Veduta paintings consists entirely of moonlit landscapes and seascapes that embrace the essence of the sublime while situating the series within a specific moment in time: darkness. Inspired by masterworks by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Milton Avery, Camille Pissarro, and Frederic Edwin Church as underpaintings, Bedford layers vivid neon-colored tree and cacti motifs, many native to her Southern Californian environs. A third element introduces an architectural gesture: a three-quarter view of an interior room defined by a floor, back wall, and hints of two adjoining walls. Together, the underpainting, neon flora, and architectural framework draw the viewer into an intimate, immersive space, enhancing the experience of the sublime.

Within Nocturnes, Secrist Beach presents eleven paintings from Whitney Bedford’s new body of work Leda and the Swan, featuring reinterpretations of a single painting—itself an interpretive work—Luigi Mussini’s Leda and the Swan (1840–1850). The subject, drawn from Greek mythology, has been rendered repeatedly over centuries in painting, sculpture, poetry, and numerous other artistic forms. Depicting the seduction of Leda by the Greek god Zeus, who appears in the form of a swan, the enduring popularity of the myth lends itself to the charged erotic atmosphere of the scene.

Mussini’s version is striking in its detail, form, and execution, resulting in a sensual painting that serves as a constant throughout Bedford’s versions. Her return to this single composition amplifies her interest in repetition as a method: how reiteration alters meaning, and how art history and personal narrative converge through the mechanics of reproduction. Through repetition, the painting ceases to function as a fixed mythological scene and instead becomes a stage for transition across centuries of art history, shifting notions of mastery and originality, and the personal narratives that emerge through sustained return. In this way, the image heightens the visibility of change—whether formal, conceptual, or biographical.

Image: Whitney Bedford, Veduta (Constable Moonlight), 2026.
Image credit: Evan Bedford.

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Tags: Contemporary, Gallery, Nocturnes, painting, Secrist | Beach, West Town, Whitney Bedford Chicago