LARI PITTMAN

“I am honored that my work is being shown at The Long Museum in Shanghai,” said Pittman. “The Long Museum has championed my work over the years and I am grateful for their support in mounting such an ambitious exhibition in Asia. This exhibition is special for me because it will showcase many works which haven’t been exhibited before alongside important paintings, including six paintings from the Long Museum collection. I am excited to see my work within the context of the type of contemporary cityscape that has inspired me throughout my career.”

Throughout his illustrious four-decade career, Pittman has developed a distinct visual language that has established him as one of the most significant painters of our generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols, a compilation of varied painting techniques, unique color combinations, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman has had numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world including a major retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2019 that was accompanied by an expansive publication. His work has also been included in the Whitney Biennial (1993, 1995, 1997), Documenta (1997), and the Venice Biennale (2003), among other acclaimed shows.

In Magic Realism, the visual motif of eggs, which has appeared in Pittman’s work since the mid-1980s, is seen consistently. The forms are integrated into nightscapes and cityscapes; they appear as monuments and as part of nature scenes, ready to hatch into life. Eggs are part of the artist’s utopian perspective: a feminist and generative vision of the world rooted in the exuberance of life. Filled with eggs in a variety of sizes and guises, these paintings serve as love letters to the possibilities of life in the twenty-first century, including optimism and renewal.

“Lari Pittman’s work reflects the exuberance of eras past and homes for future worlds,” said Steiner, curator of the exhibition. “His complex imagery brings ordered structures to contemporary ideas, which are presented through unique colors and forms. Lari’s work has left an indelible mark on the history of art, inspiring so many of his peers as well as a younger generation of artists, and it has been a true pleasure to work with him on his first museum survey in Asia.”

Highlights from the exhibition include selections from Pittman’s recent bodies of work Cities with Egg Monuments: Luminous and Sparkling Cities with Egg Monuments, which were presented at Lehmann Maupin in Seoul (2022) and in New York (2023), respectively. Created during the global pandemic between 2020-2022, these bodies of work include a number of monumentally scaled paintings that are characterized by the artist’s unique visual aesthetic containing dense, interwoven imagery in vibrant colors. His paintings have consistently explored topics including life, death, love, sex, consumerism, and capitalism. Here, Pittman approaches such themes through the lens of isolation and rebirth, looking both backward and forward in time. The history of decoration is another key element in Pittman’s work, deployed not only for visual patterning but as subject matter itself. Here, it appears as complex ornamentation and a consideration of aesthetics.

The works on view also demonstrate the conceptual strategies and rigor that underpin Pittman’s process. In each work, he begins with the title and then maps visual structure, which he refers to as the work’s architecture; from there, he populates his canvases with imagery related to his thematic concerns. Recently, Pittman has presented meditations on modern life, ranging from isolation to abundance. His otherworldly settings are suggestive of the urbanity of cityscapes and the idiosyncrasies of nature. Teeming with life and visual excess, the canvases on view in Magic Realism invite viewers to fantasize about the exuberance and hope for the future.