You have seen Annie Lapin's (NAP #91) work in our magazine, and on our blog. See her work, in the flesh, at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles. Her exhibition, Various Peep Shows, is one of our Must-See shows for the month of January!
Check out this video we produced about her a couple of years ago with Future Shipwreck. And, below the jump, read more about her current exhibition.
Honor Fraser Gallery is pleased to announce its second exhibition of new paintings by Annie Lapin.
Lapin's paintings appear to coalesce from the hazy set of information gathered at the corner of the eye. Her complex, dynamic compositions catalog her interest in the act of seeing and grapple with the process of how a painting comes into being through the viewer's engagement with it. Whether exploring visual memory or the tension between the inherent properties of paint as material and its ability to depict, her work documents and dramatizes her own sense of flux at the edge of perception. Shapes and landscapes remain on the verge of resolution and legibility in a continual process of emergence, while also rooted to the thingliness of paint.
This exhibition marks a shift for Lapin, whose previous work explored the vocabulary of Romantic and Rococo landscape painting, to a new visual language. Quick, confident brush strokes appear to rest lightly on the surface of the canvas, operating as pure mark making until the slow burn of an image makes its way to the eye. Loose paint-handling and thin washes of color plot out strange architectures through which implausible landscapes peek at the viewer. Layers of imagery, rows of spray painted lettering, and thick areas of paint seem to float at various layers in relation to each other, creating an odd spatiality. While window like vistas allow the eye to escape to deeper horizons, the shallow relief space that parallels the surface of her canvases serves as a stage for a re-enactment the work's production; choreographed pours, stains, smears and drips act as both deconstructive and constructive moments, as if paint intended to describe the world of the painting were also peeling up from the image, like an unstable element in a temporary collage. The resulting images appear to be simultaneously frozen in the entropic act of falling apart while they emphatically record the constructive painterly impulse. Ultimately, a poetic emerges out of this dynamic, which for Lapin, speaks to what paintings can and should be.
Annie Lapin lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BA from Yale University and her MFA from UCLA. Lapin is the recent recipient of the Falk Visiting Artist Award from the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, where she was the subject of a solo exhibition in 2013. Other recent solo shows include exhibitions at Josh Lilley Gallery in London, the Santa Barbara Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, CA, and Yautepec Gallery in Mexico City. She has also recently participated in the group exhibitions at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, in Overland Park, KS, and the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA.
