Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence
Lari Pittman is a Los Angeles-based artist, renowned for his densely layered, richly patterned, and chaotically charged paintings. His work undermines aesthetic hierarchies and embraces the decorative and applied arts. His most recent works have been devoted to patterns and visual systems as emblematic of society, carving out his place in our contemporary culture of saturated image consumption.
"When Lari Pittman adopted painting as a young queer artist in the 1970s, he saw the medium as a pleasurable opportunity to “fix something up.” With this can-do attitude—and its hints of an interior decorator’s fey obsessiveness—Pittman performed an energetic pirouette around the dour discussions of painting’s death. This career retrospective (the artist’s first) includes more than eighty works and proves that painting, for Pittman, has always been an occasion for conjecture (another one of his long-espoused bonnes idées), even when references to Leonor Fini, Natalia Goncharova, Henri Matisse, or Remedios Varo are abundant. The exhibition will also features a re-creation of the artist’s Orangerie, the sensuous, atmospheric survey of works on paper he debuted in 2011. In the original staging, dozens of pieces were hung salon style atop a wall painting of a trellis—a decorative flourish suggesting that the medium of painting is not the only thing in need of fixing up. Travels to Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway, May 24–October 5, 2020."— Andy Campbell, September 2019
Lari Pittman, Untitled #4, Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on gessoed canvas over wood. 102 × 76 in. (259.1 × 193 × 5.1 cm). Private collection. © Lari Pittman, courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Artforum website.
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