ART-PRESENTATION: Lari Pittman-Declaration of Independence

Lari Pittman is a contemporary American artist best known for his collage-like paintings and prints which integrate multiple pictorial languages into a single work. Melding advertisements, gestural abstraction, Surrealism, Victorian silhouettes, and Folk art, the artist revels in dichotomies of ugliness and beauty, chaos and calm. Like Philip Taafe, Pittman takes on grandiose ideas of death, transcendence, and semiotics in a way both light hearted and profound.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hammer Museum Archive

“Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence” is the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of Lari Pittman. 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. The exhibition includes approximately 80 paintings and 50 works on paper drawn from the Hammer’s own holdings as well as from many Public and Private Collections throughout the world. Among the works of the exhibition. 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. In recent years Pittman has moved inward, depicting memories, subjects related to his own extensive history as a collector of Mexican craft and artifacts, and a diverse range of artistic influences. These paintings function as rich dreamscapes and provide insight into the artist’s psyche. Key figures from art history are juxtaposed with references to the artist’s own studio production—represented as birds, babies, vulvas, thought bubbles, and other points of origin. His painted surfaces have become smoother, accentuating the synthetic quality of the works and showcasing the artist’s mastery of the medium. Among these recent works on view is Pittman’s cycle of mural-scale paintings titled “Flying Carpets” (2013). Three large paintings that Lari Pittman refers to as “flying carpets” like all of the work he has produced during his nearly four-decade career, are vibrant and ornate, crammed edge to edge with references both historical and contemporary. “Flying Carpet With a Waning Moon Over a Violent Nation” contains five large circles with cross hairs, which seem to be targeting a soft-focus landscape. They’re interspersed with dangling nooses. The implied violence of the composition represents the “effects of advanced capitalism” according to Pittman. “I hate to sound so old-school Marxist about it” he adds. Pittman generally works alone in the studio and has described painting as a physical activity that involves his entire body. His paintings are created without preliminary sketches, and their large scale mirrors the outsized, complex, and even mythic ideas that inform them. In contrast, his works on paper are more intimate and graphic, featuring fewer objects and a more pronounced flattening of illusionistic space. The drawings offer a quieter counterbalance to his paintings. Also, on view are the artist’s recent books, with feature unique paintings on paper. A selection of drawings spanning Pittman’s career comprise “Orangerie” a stand-alone installation that provides an intimate space for viewing his works on paper. Updated to include new drawings up to the present, “Orangerie” showcases his lushly colored and decorated drawings on walls covered in painted trellis designs.

Info: Curator: Connie Butler, Curatorial Assistant: Vanessa Arizmendi, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, Duration: 29/9/19-5/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-20:00, Sat-sun 11:00-17:00, https://hammer.ucla.edu