Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Lari Pittman’s solo exhibition The Remedy of Analog Space and Time, unveiling a new body of work by the Los Angeles-based painter featuring twelve new paintings and ten works on paper. Few living artists have shaped the language of contemporary painting as profoundly as Pittman. These paintings show Pittman further refining his distinctive visual language, which draws on a wide spectrum of historical and pop culture sources to create works that continue to offer new aesthetic and narrative possibilities. At a moment when questions of identity, craft, decoration, and the politics of image-making are once again at the forefront of cultural discourse, Pittman’s work feels especially resonant and timeless.

Pittman is known for his dense, exuberant works that mine the rich tableaux of fine and applied arts, decoration, design, and architecture. He has lived in Los Angeles for five decades, but spent much of his childhood in Colombia, his mother’s home country, and his work has consistently reveled in and reflected the vibrant multiplicity of both Los Angeles and Latin America. He builds his often-delirious compositions from disparate elements: streets signs, textiles, storybook illustrations, cityscapes, dream imagery, and bits of text in several languages that directly address the viewer.

“[Hot air balloons] became a kind of a touchstone that happens throughout the body of work. I was really thinking about the first moment that human beings could self-levitate—a moment of excitement, and fundamental self-estrangement. It had some sort of metaphoric resonance that could be useful today, when we’re confronted with both the familiar and the monumentally unfamiliar.” —Lari Pittman, Hyperallergic

Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and ropes), a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman creates complex compositions that mediate the tension between color, text, and imagery; landscape and decoration; and chaos and order with remarkable dexterity and often on a large scale, and the artist has an innate ability to create compositions in which each element within a painting is given equal space and significance.

In the mid-1970s, Pittman attended California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, completing a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. The Institute’s strong feminist arts program challenged the devaluation of art forms traditionally associated with women, and it was partially as a result of his engagement with this program that Pittman developed an interest in undermining aesthetic hierarchies and embracing the decorative arts. Pittman’s strong affinity for the decorative can be seen throughout his numerous bodies of work, and it has contributed to his singular visual style. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince a shift in focus towards interior spaces, including domestic and psychological subjects.