Lari Pittman's works, densely packed with a plethora of patterns, symbols, and images, are inspired by diverse sources ranging from commercial advertising to folk art, applied arts, and European decorative traditions.
Read MoreThemes of desire, violence, and vulnerability feature frequently in his paintings and drawings, which are also concerned with maintaining a balanced relationship between a cacophony of colours, forms, patterns, and texts.
Studying at CalArts in the 1970s, Pittman became familiar with the Feminist Art Program (FAP)—established in the previous year by Judy Chicago at Fresno State College—and such alternative music scenes as punk rock, which led him to explore more marginalised fields of the arts. In particular, Pittman engaged with craft and other decorative practices, which have historically been associated with feminine labour and thus removed from the male-oriented art world.
Pittman began to incorporate bold patterns and colours into paintings such as Maladies and Treatments (1983), which features patterns evocative of wallpaper on either side of the canvas and irregular shapes against a black background. Pink, purple, and orange dominate another painting titled Where the Soul Intact Will Shed Its Scabs (8624 A.D.) (1987–1988), in which the artist portrays a ghostly sailing ship, a row of staring eyes, and a ring of rubies arranged into a shape that recalls a Ferris wheel.
In the 1990s, Pittman created bodies of paintings responding to the AIDS crisis and culture wars. Among them is the 'Needy' series, which depicts multi-gendered beings through body parts, including bulbous forms resembling breasts and the human body cropped at the buttocks; the repetition of the number 69, denoting a sexual position; or an upturned owl as a symbol for rebellious unlearning.
While known for working without sketches, Pittman prepares, in a sense, for new paintings by keeping a list of notes that prevent him from repeating himself. The artist also writes titles first, as he said in his 2019 interview with Art in America, to help determine imagery for each painting.
Pittman has also discussed the influence of his Colombian heritage in interviews, suggesting that the comparative abundance of hyperbole in the Spanish language has led him to choose 'hyper-romantic, hyperbolic titles' for his work.
Pittman continues to engage with the decorative in his paintings, while combining images drawn from across cultures and time periods. Dioramas, his 2021 solo exhibition at Lévy Gorvy, Paris, for example, included paintings of detailed jewellery against richly ornamented backgrounds evocative of Baroque still lifes. Each work, titled Diorama and numbered, also shows white bars on the lower half of the canvas—suggesting the same barriers found in museums and galleries to protect the artefacts.
Parts of the depicted jewellery are inscribed with years that reference key events in the history of the United States and France, from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the Liberation of Paris in 1944, each a period of violence and liberation that is presented alongside items of delicacy and beauty.
