Annie Lapin: Unwilded

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Unwilded, a series of eight intimately-scaled paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This will be her third solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from September 21 through November 2. 

Lapin is known for her genre-bending paintings that draw from art history to examine a world overwhelmed by data, divergent histories, and conflicting truths. Drawing from a wide range of visual sources, including the artist’s own photo archive, online visual media, and well-known paintings and photographs from throughout art history, Lapin creates paintings that merge fragmented allusions to visual culture with gestural painterly intuition. 

Her newest series Unwilded, unfolds over eight new paintings, each 24 x 19 inches. These works take the concept of the garden as a central theme. Historically, gardens have operated as a highly designed, controlled, and curated selection of the natural world, bent to the will of humanity’s aesthetic desires. Looking specifically at the public and private gardens of prominent families and patrons of the arts alongside the gardens of artists, these new works address the sociological and economic systems implied by the existence of the gardens themselves and considers each site as a node in a network of information, connected to nature, history, and personal experience. For Lapin, the expanded field of landscape is challenged with depicting how the meaning of a place is constantly in flux and how those changes impact our perception of the natural world. 

Lapin begins each work by pouring paint onto the surface of her canvas. This initial gesture allows her paintings to begin with an element of chance, which then evolves into a visual armature through which Lapin develops her composition. Using this initial abstraction as a Rorschach test of sorts, Lapin will find suggestions of a landscape or body in the poured paint, which she further develops by referencing appropriated images, a process that merges a collection of digital artifacts, memories, and associations archived online. Moving between abstraction and trompe l’oeil, Lapin creates a pictorial space that is akin to our own perception: one littered with conflicting information that must logically connect. 

In contrast with previous bodies of work which focused on idealized visions of the landscape the paintings in Unwilded refer to a series of estates and public gardens that exist today, such as Monet’s garden at Giverny, the Jardin Botanico Nacional of Chile, Cindy Sherman’s home garden, and the Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg. The description of any specific “place” in these works gives way to abstraction and idealization, while the specific historical and cultural residue of each site adds new layers of context and psychology to each work.  

Building upon years of examining the way in which art history and the internet come together to shape perceptions of nature––be it through grand depictions of the American West or the collective archive of online images on social media and travel sites–– Unwilded continues the artist’s investigation into how this proliferation of images morphs our understanding of place. While shifting her attention towards a group of specific gardens, these works rely on the prism of the internet and its kaleidoscope of information to build a final, subjective image of a place, one that remains influx as it is shaped through countless depictions, stories, and myths that are themselves never fully defined.

Annie Lapin (b. 1978, Washington, D.C.; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2007, her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 2001. Select solo exhibitions include Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Josh Lilley, London, England; Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles, CA; Yautepec Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA. Group exhibitions include the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; Hilger Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy; Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; LA Louver, Los Angeles, CA; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY.

Lapin is the recipient of the Falk Visiting Artist Award at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC and she has been awarded residencies at Anderson Ranch Art Center, Snowmass Village, CO; Grand Arts, Kansas, MO; Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughan, Ireland; and Chautauqua Institute, New York, NY. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Modern Painters, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine, Art and Antiquities, Artnews, Hyperallergic, Artsy, and New American Paintings.

Annie Lapin’s work is included in the permanent collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach, CA; 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 Zabludowicz Collection, London, England.