ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Kate Pincus Whitney

Mapping the movement of culture through histories of spices, wax candles, or fine white china bowls, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s tablescapes are a place of narrative portraiture–sometimes a sort of shrine, sometimes a stage or a commons. Sometimes they are a place for formal or historical political acts of agency, and sometimes, she simply wishes to capture the essence of a person through the objects they consume or surround themselves with.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Anat Ebgi Gallery Archive

Kate Pincus-Whitney’s solo exhibition “To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home” debuts new tablescape paintings, including some of her largest to date. Synthesizing contemporary life and mythology, Pincus-Whitney’s paintings map culture, place, and self through the foods and objects we consume. She packs her maximalist paintings with platters of food from iconic Los Angeles restaurants and eateries, glittering glassware, menus, local flora, sentimental objects, and so many books. Titles range from Jonathan Gold’s “Counter Intelligence” to ”Visions of the Occult: An Untold Story of Art & Magic” by Victoria Jenkins, to a catalogue of Richard Diebenkorn’s  “Ocean Park” paintings. Pincus-Whitney is both dyslexic and stereo blind (which affects her depth perception), the inclusion of these texts, brand labels, and icons address legibility. Both through a literal sense—encouraging viewers to tease out their own connections, but also through an examination of how one ‘reads’ pictures. Perspectival shifts, jumps between places, cuisines, and through time (RIP Perino’s), channel the subconscious and symbolic relationships to her vast and researched references, wherein everything is mined. Here, the sacred and profane come together around the same table. A discreet and ongoing sub-series of works, dubbed the ‘door paintings,’ adhere to the dimensions of a single door turned horizontally. They are invitations to enter and join the banquet feast set out for viewers, deities, heroines. This reorientation gestures away from so-called objective reality, leading viewers to the uncharted wilderness of psychic reality. However fractured and hallucinator the  exhibition ensconces us in vibrant microcosms of Pincus-Whitney’s personal sense memory and regional history, where certain restaurants and neighborhoods become characters themselves: To live, to dine, to toast, to celebrate the power of communing with one another. At times Pincus-Whitney’s compositions act as shrines, others a stage, or narrative portraits that reveal truths about life and death, the existential and alchemical. Deeply invested in early movements of Modernism, she mines the ritual of “the meal” to tap into our collective unconscious. Taking on the tradition of cubist “still life” in the lineage of Braque and Léger, Pincus-Whitney’s frenetic and improvisational approach is energetic, bursting, full of movement. Overflowing, these consuming constructions are the anti-still life, thrusting forward, hinging on a network of delicious abundance, nourishing the belly and the brain.

Photo: Kate Pincus Whitney, To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home: Wednesday Farmers Market (From Tutti Fruiti  to Pollan) or The Times They Are A’ Changing’, 2024, Acrylic, Polycolor, Incising and Gouache on Wooden “Door” Panel, 32 x 80 inches / 81.3 x 203.2 cm, © Kate Pincus Whitney, Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi Gallery

Info: Anat Ebgi Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 29/6-17/8/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, https://anatebgi.com/