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.
Pittman exhibited works from his series A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. The series was completed in 1995 and contains more than forty ambitious paintings. In them Pittman layers and juxtaposes cartoonlike renderings of objects and bodies with ornate patterns and corporate logos. In Untitled #16, a colorful array of variously scaled fairy- tale images, both sweet and grotesque, is overlaid at top and bottom with emblems of credit cards, a primary means of accessing enchantment in today’s world.
Introduction
Lari George Pittman (born 1952 in Glendale, California) is a Colombian-American contemporary artist and painter. Pittman is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Painting and Drawing at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Wikidata identifier
Q13593213
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 24, 2025.
Introduction
Pittman's canvases focus on complex personal iconography rendered in heavily layered and meticulously applied paint.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500115001
Names
Lari Pittman, Lari Pittmann
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 24, 2025.
