About Bambou Gili
Bambou Gili’s paintings are worldbuilding projects, sprawling in narrative and unified by rich, tight color palettes.
Throughout her body of work, fantastical landscapes activate the feminine figures inside them, allowing for nature to become an ally, a co-conspirator, a unique character in and of itself.
In each series, the artist—whose inspirations range from the animation of Hayao Miyazaki to the French Impressionists—dives into a singular color spectrum to experiment freely and tap into possibility. Oil drippings in green, blue, or purple produce a textural, eerie stillness that moves across tableaux like an omniscient specter.
Gili’s surrealistic scenes, imbued with this energy, are both clandestine and playful: lush plants, serene bodies of water, and ethereal trees conceal subjects from one another as their concurrent stories unfold, and each protagonist exudes a presence that matches the magnitude of her surroundings.
Within Gili’s alternate universe, environment and human emotion vibrate at an equal frequency somewhere between waking and dreaming.
Bambou Gili (b. 1996, New York, NY) has had solo exhibitions at Arsenal Contemporary, New York and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; James Fuentes, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Galerie Perrotin, New York, NY; WAOW Gallery, Hong Kong; and Asia Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan among others. Gili has appeared in publications including The Guardian, New American Paintings, Elephant, Artnet News, Purple, and Artsy. The artist is a recipient of the 2024 Spirit Now Acquisition Prize, organized by the Women’s Art Collection at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Gili lives and works in New Mexico.
Photo by Zeph Colombotto