Annie Lapin: Fragile Familiar

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Fragile Familiar, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This marks Lapin’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. 

In Fragile Familiar, Lapin offers a deeply personal homage to the landscape of Southern California—a terrain shaped as much by light and memory as by earth and sky. Drawing on her long-standing interest in visual perception, art history, and the natural world, Lapin paints the terrains she knows intimately: sun-washed hillsides, desert plateaus, tangled brush, vast urban spaces, and endless skies rendered in radiant layers of color and form.

Drawn from an intimate, emotional response to her environment, these new paintings reflect a shift toward immediacy and presence in the artist’s exploration of landscape. “This particular patch of California light and warmth has lured millions of people, myself included, reluctantly, uncertainly, to its promise,” she writes. “There is an ever-present tension between the land and what we build here, where the same sun that beckons one day makes us feel the fragility of our footing the next.”

Lapin begins each painting by pouring thin layers of paint onto the canvas, allowing organic abstraction to seed the composition. Using this foundation as a kind of visual Rorschach, she coaxes recognizable forms from the fluid gestures—mountains, flora, fragments of sky—and weaves them together with sourced imagery from her personal archive, the internet, and art history. The resulting scenes are multifaceted and immersive, echoing the complexity of how we experience place through memory, emotion, and mediated image.

Known for her genre-bending approach, Lapin seamlessly blends representation and abstraction. Photographic blurs merge with painterly marks, while skyscapes dissolve into raw canvas or bloom into hyperreal color. Her work captures a feeling of motion and multiplicity, like a landscape seen from a moving car, or half-remembered from a dream.

In Venus and Lights, a nighttime cityscape of Los Angeles becomes a reflection of the heavens, with ribbons of car lights weaving through valleys like terrestrial constellations. In Joshua Tree//Relief of Relief from Sun, the desert appears both serene and electric, its brittle beauty rendered in luminous, saturated tones. The Gape and Glow merges fragments of Malibu and Glendale trails into a composite space where particulate haze, layered skylines, and ecological fragility coexist in a single emotive vista.

Though painted in response to a region shaped by contradictions, lush and arid, urban and wild, Lapin’s landscapes are ultimately meditations on presence, reverence, and wonder. The undercurrents of ecological fragility are ever-present, but they remain quiet, secondary to the artist’s central aim: to capture the felt experience of being in a place so visually and emotionally charged.

Annie Lapin (b. Washington D.C., 1978. Lives and works in Los Angeles) 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 Nazarian / Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; Christine König Galerie, Vienna, Austria; 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.