LILY STOCKMAN: WOMEN
November 8 - December 20, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8, 6-8 PM

'Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. ...What is going on in these pictures in my mind?'  

- Joan Didion

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to present LILY STOCKMAN in her first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled Women, on view from November 8 through December 20, 2014. An artist's reception will be held on Saturday, November 8, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

Lily Stockman's exuberant, vibratory abstract paintings are based on commonplace experience that transcends the 'object' to reveal a phenomenological experience for the viewer. They are a distillation of her own immediate interactions in the world: her observations on specific architecture (a drive-in theater in Twentynine Palms, the Art Deco 'movie palaces' of Downtown Los Angeles), landscape (the desert palette of Rajasthan, India, and Joshua Tree, California), evolution through repetition (Darwin's finches, Agnes Martin's grids), passions (gardening, Indian textiles), and labors and sacrifices (craft, beauty, purpose). Stockman forces us to look at the object as not so much the result of a process but a representation of one. Her work poses new questions for process in terms of both the analysis and the making of paintings, and points to how multiple activities, histories, and locations can be embedded within single images.
Borrowing from a banquet of art historical traditions (she is a student of both Indian miniature and Mongolian thangka painting), Stockman's work is athletic and rigorously anti-technology; hers is a practice devoted to the hand, the pulled line, and multiple layers of transparencies that serve to coax her curiosity about the physical process of making a painting. The Women are suggested through a combination of pared down geometricized compositions that employ tubular lines, heightened colors (Pepto pink, gunmetal grey) and bawdy, organic shapes suggestive of body parts. Yet the works are not the contrived detritus or byproduct of art history--neither a form of appropriation nor a form of conceptual painting.

Stockman writes about her hardscrabble garden in the Mojave Desert as 'the perfect metaphor/mode for painting: a fine balance between bending something to your will, your fancy, your instinct, your style, your perspective, while also working within the strict parameters of the given conditions; the harsh climate of the desert or the picture plane.' Thus, we are brought to her works? ultimate dislocation: out of history and into the moment. 'How one couches oneself as a painter in 2014--in the tradition of 19th and 20th century Western art--is ultimately irrelevant,' states Stockman. 'What endures, what has meaning, what has lasting clout is the experience.'

Based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, Lily Stockman graduated with an honors thesis in painting in 2006 from Harvard University and received her MFA in studio art from New York University in 2012, where she also taught undergraduate painting. She was a 2013 teaching fellow in the Visual & Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University, and has apprenticed in thangka painting with the Union of Mongolian Artists in Ulaanbaatar, Monglia, and in Indian miniature painting with Ajay Sharma in Jaipur, India. She is co-founder of Block Shop Textiles, a hand block printed textile collaborative in Bagru, Rajasthan. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include The Morning After at Tyler Wood Gallery in San Francisco and for all intents and purposes and The Road at Luis De Jesus, Los Angeles. This winter she will participate in exhibitions at Gavlak Gallery in Los Angeles and Palm Beach.

For further information, please contact Luis De Jesus at 310-838-6000, or email gallery@luisdejesus.com.