Lari Pittman
"Untitled", 2019
Acrylic, ink, spray paint, colored pencil, and permanent marker on arches paper
Framed: 32 ½ x 24 x 1 ½ inches (82.6 x 61 x 3.8 cm)
© Lari Pittman. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York and Seoul.
Photo credit: Daniel Kukla

Selected by Jarrett Earnest

Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and ropes), a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman creates complex compositions that mediate the tension between color, text, and imagery; landscape and decoration; and chaos and order with remarkable dexterity and often on a large scale, and the artist has an innate ability to create compositions in which each element within a painting is given equal space and significance. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince a shift in focus towards interior spaces, including domestic, philosophical, and psychological subjects.