Declaration of Independence

拉里·皮特曼

Hammer Museum

Los Angeles

2019年9月29日–2020年1月5日

Los Angeles, California

The Hammer Museum presents Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence, the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of American artist Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles). As a prolific painter and sharp social critic, Pittman has been a strong presence in both the international sphere and the L.A. art community. From his earliest experiments with collage and decoration, to the iconic paintings he produced in response to the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the 1990s, to his more recent mural-scale paintings and symbolic, stylized paintings of textiles paired with portraits, Pittman’s works have remained prescient, incisive and exquisitely rendered. This exhibition will include approximately 80 paintings and 50 works on paper drawn from the Hammer’s own holdings as well as from the many public and private collections throughout the world. On view September 29, 2019 – January 5, 2020, Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence marks the first time the Hammer Museum has ever devoted all of its major exhibition spaces to a single living artist. Following its presentation at the Hammer, the exhibition will travel to Kistefos Museet in Jevnaker, Norway May 24 – October 5, 2020.

Pittman’s highly detailed works on panel and paper—grand tales about love, sex, death, art, and citizenship—feature a rich visual language that he has developed over the course of his career, replete with owls, Victorian silhouettes, flying text, and exaggerated and sexualized bodies. These meticulously crafted works have become emblematic of a generation of queer artists who reclaimed ornamentation and lush detail during the 1980s, employing them as part of their political and personal iconography. At the same time Pittman shared the noirish sensibilities of many of his Los Angeles based, artist peers whose influences included that era’s thriving punk rock scene and the legendary Feminist Art Program at CalArts. In 1992 his work was featured in the critically acclaimed MOCA exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, along with that of Mike Kelley, Liz Larner, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, and others. Pittman’s blend of densely painted surfaces and codified references to sexuality and other charged topics, such as the history of racial violence in the United States, aligned his works with the discourse surrounding the contested body in the early 1990s.

拉里·皮特曼

Grand Tour, 2011

拉里·皮特曼

Untitled, 2013

“In addition to being an extraordinary painter, Lari has been an important figure in the Los Angeles art community for the past four decades as both artist and teacher. He has influenced generations of artists as a professor in UCLA’s art department, and is part of a generation of artists who emerged internationally in the 1990s. His paintings confront history, politics, violence and sexuality in a highly aestheticized manner that is both exquisitely painted and deeply responsive to the issues of our time.” —Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum

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.

In the mid-1970s, Pittman attended California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, completing a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. The Institute’s strong feminist arts program challenged the devaluation of art forms traditionally associated with women, and it was partially as a result of his engagement with this program that Pittman developed an interest in undermining aesthetic hierarchies and embracing the decorative arts. Pittman’s strong affinity for the decorative can be seen throughout his numerous bodies of work, and it has contributed to his singular visual style. 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 and psychological subjects.

了解艺术家