21 Sep Unwilded
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/83098-unwilded
Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Unwilded, a new series of eight intimately-scaled paintings by Los
Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This will be her third solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from
September 21 through November 2.
Lapin is known for her relentless exploration of various genres of painting, such as landscape, figuration,
and abstraction. Employing visual references from a wide variety of sources, including the artist’s own
photo archive, online visual media, and well-known paintings and photographs from throughout art
history, her works are an amalgamation of fractured, yet familiar forms, each coalescing into a coherent
depiction of our world.
Her newest series Unwilded, unfolds over eight new paintings, each 24 x 19 inches. These works take the
concept of the garden as a central theme. Historically, gardens have operated as a highly designed,
controlled, and curated selection of the natural world, bent to the will of humanity’s aesthetic desires.
Looking specifically at the public and private gardens of prominent families and patrons of the arts
alongside the gardens of artists, these new works address the sociological and economic systems implied
by the existence of the gardens themselves and considers each garden as a node in a network of
information, connected to nature, history, and personal experience. For Lapin, the expanded field of
landscape is challenged with depicting how the meaning of a place is constantly in flux and how those
changes impact our perception of the natural world.
Unlike past works, the paintings in Unwilded refer to well-known sites such as Monet’s garden at Giverny,
the Jardin Botanico Nacional of Chile, Cindy Sherman’s home garden, and the Mirabell Gardens in
Salzburg. With the location only referenced in the painting’s title, these works transcend mere depictions
of the specific gardens. Rather, each painting serves as a web of references, employing images from
disparate sources that come together to form an entirely new depiction of place, one that merges
abstraction, representation, and the historical residue of a specific location to form a new kind of likeness.
Lapin begins each work by pouring paint onto the surface of her canvas. This initial gesture allows her
paintings to begin with an element of chance, which then evolves into a visual armature through which
Lapin develops her composition. Using this initial abstraction as a Rorschach test of sorts, Lapin will find
suggestions of a landscape or body in the poured paint, which she further develops by referencing
appropriated images; a process that merges a collection of digital artifacts, memories, and associations
archived online.
Moving between abstraction and trompe l’oeil, Lapin creates a pictorial space that is akin
to our own perception: one littered with conflicting information that must logically connect.
Building upon years of examining the way in which art history and the internet come together to shape
perceptions of nature –be it through grand depictions of the American West or the collective archive of
online images on social media and travel sites– Unwilded continues the artist’s investigation into how
this proliferation of images morphs our understanding of place. While shifting her attention towards a
group of specific gardens, these works rely on the prism of the internet and its kaleidoscope of
information to build a final, subjective image of a place, one that remains influx as it is shaped through
countless depictions, stories, and myths that are themselves never fully defined.
Annie Lapin (b. 1978, Washington, D.C.; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received her Master of Fine
Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007, her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in
2001. Select solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New
York, NY; Josh Lilley, London, England; Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; Weatherspoon Art Museum,
Greensboro, NC; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA; Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; and Museum of
Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA. Group exhibitions include the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los
Angeles, CA; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; Hilger Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Museo di
Capodimonte, Naples, Italy; Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; LA Louver, Los Angeles, CA; and the
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY.
Source Credit: Content and images from Wall Street International Magazine by . Read the original article - https://www.meer.com/en/83098-unwilded