NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MILES McENERY GALLERY is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Annie Lapin. The artist’s second exhibition at the gallery, Bones of Light, will open on 28 April at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 4 June 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated digital catalogue featuring an essay by Mardee Goff and a conversation with Ed Schad.
Lapin’s most recent body of work consists of eight paintings in which visceral pours of paint and pure color collide with digital and historical imagery to invoke mysterious allegories about notions of the sublime, the experience of landscape, and the interplay of the psychic and the material. Goff writes, “Beneath richly textured and boldly saturated surfaces, Lapin has puzzled together a version of the world that presents itself more like a dream than reality. Her large-scale paintings plot out jarring spatial arrangements that distort time and skew perspective. Multiple dimensions collide on fluctuating ground, an effect that creates perceptual shifts that jolt the imagination and propel us to the edges of our minds.” Together, the paintings operate in a mythical world or narrative that questions humanity’s place in nature, our attempt to document the world around us, and the beauty and unease of the confusion therein.
Lapin reveals, “Each painting is built upon a foundation of color field-like pours on tinted canvas, which flow into an array of symbols and allusions that simultaneously smash into each other accidentally, yet weave a story, nonetheless. The paintings point to the magic and absurdity of sincere attempts to convey the grandeur of landscape in the rectangle of a painting, while striving to create a sense of visual flux that parallels our experience of the world.” Employing various elements of the painted image, including abstract language and trompe l’oeil, the works splendidly play with vision and perception. For Lapin, historical endpoints themselves have always seemed accidental. This is mirrored in her work as art historical allusions appear next to the spontaneous swirls of pours and roller marks, both equal players in the story she suggests through each painting. The scenes are densely packed with references and are steeped in metaphorical meaning, inviting prolonged contemplation, and revealing more of themselves over time. “When it comes to landscape, depictions are never pure, they are never simply a matter of recording what is present,” Schad declares.
ANNIE LAPIN (b. 1979, Washington, D.C.) received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Select solo exhibitions include “Bones of Light,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Strange Little Beast,” Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; “The Art of Heads and Hands,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Watchers and Winks,” Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “How To Bury Your Stuff,” Josh Lilley, London, United Kingdom; “Various Peep Shows,” Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “See?,” Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; “Annie Lapin: Falk Visiting Artist,” Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; “Amnesiacs,” Josh Lilley Gallery, London, United Kingdom; “Find Finding ing,” Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; “History=ing,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA; “Ideal Idyl Idol,” Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; “The Pure Space Animate,” Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; “Parallel Deliria Iteration,” Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA; “Parallel Deliria,” Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; “Gruppology,” Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, and “Paintings and Prints,” Davenport Studio 54, New Haven, CT.
Select group exhibitions include “FROM THE COLLECTION OF ANONYMOUS,” North Dakota Museum of Art, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND; “Art and Hope at the End of the Tunnel,” USC Fischer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; “Hold On Tight,” Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; “All Together Now,” Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; “Do You Think it Needs a Cloud?,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “L.A. Painting: Five Year Survey,” Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; “Belief in Giants,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “The Ecstasy of Mary Shelley,” Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles, CA; “Her Crowd: New Art by Women from Our Neighbors’ Private Collections,” Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; “Tribal Tats,” Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, CA; “Angels With Dirty Faces,” Hilger Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; “Lost in a Sea of Red,” The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; “Sincerely Yours,” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; “The Go-Between,” Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy; “Dee Ferris, Barnaby Furnas, Annie Lapin,” Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; “B.A.T. (Bon à Tirer/Good to Go),” Offramp Gallery, Pasadena, CA; “Annie Lapin, John Lehr, Alon Levin, Philip Vanderhyden,” Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; “Fanatic,” Post, Los Angeles, CA; “Raw Material,” Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; “Stone Gravy” (curated by David Pagel), Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY; “Chasm of the Supernova” (curated by Adam Miller), Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, CA, and “Sentimental Education,” Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL.
Her work is included in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara, CA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, England.
She is the recipient of awards and residences including the Falk Visiting Artist Award, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Residency, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Residency, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO; Residency, Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughn, Ireland, and Residency, Chautauqua Institute, Chautauqua, New York, NY.
Lapin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.