KIM DINGLE

Kim Dingle began her series of restaurant paintings in the mid-2000s when the artist opened and operated a full-service restaurant, ‘Fatty’s’ in her Eagle Rock, Los Angeles studio. Conceived of nearly accidentally, beginning with Dingle and her partner making coffee for themselves, it quickly expanded to serve the neighbourhood, with Dingle working as the ‘Director of Wine and Janitorials’. These paintings documented Dingle’s experiences in restaurant work—daily routines from food preparation to maintenance and cleaning. A parallel for the artist’s own life, these works show the overwhelming conditions that led the artist to close the restaurant, which ran for over a decade, after a ‘last supper’. Dingle’s restaurant mandala series, which is at the core of the forthcoming exhibition at the gallery, was started in 2008 in Dingle’s backroom studio. Dingle imposed the traditional, meditative form of the mandala, onto the restaurant floorplan, as an attempt to reclaim the repetitive nature of service as a therapeutic exercise. Revisited and completed this year, the resulting works blur the distinction between the role of a server and the role of the artist, while also utilising the restaurant floorplan on abstract terms to explore colour and form.

Since the 1990s, Dingle has created paintings, sculptures, and installations that explore gender and its cultural perception through both abstract and figurative methods. Dingle’s work has been exhibited widely at institutions which include Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, MOCA, Los Angeles, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art, New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, among others. Dingle additionally participated in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2000. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Orange County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.