Lari Pittman
1952–

Lari Pittman’s paintings present frenetic fields of images, symbols, and patterns layered in intricately interlocking planes. Although their surfaces seem almost mechanical in their perfection, the artist executes the works unassisted, sketching out his compositions in a few sentences then using stencils, masks, and air brushes to create a dense pictorial structure. Pittman attended the California Institute of the Arts in the mid-1970s, where he studied with painters Elizabeth Murray and Vija Celmins. He joined members of the influential feminist art program in discussions about the gender bias inherent in art history and in examining works by artists marginalized from the mainstream. He embraced the “decorative” and incorporated explicitly sexual images in his paintings, making reference to gay culture, his own identity as a gay man, and also to his mixed American Protestant and Colombian Roman Catholic background. Aiming to make gregarious paintings that can speak to many different audiences, he produces works encompassing contradictory outlooks and impulses— brash to refined, giddy to despairing. “The work is a record of what the world we live in looks like,” Pittman has said.