Annie Lapin

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Annie Lapin, the artist’s second exhibition at the gallery. 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 attempts to document the world around us, and the beauty and sublimity 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.

Lapin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.