Lari Pittman Wants His Paintings to Be Gregarious

Ahead of a survey at Shanghai's Long Museum, the storied Los Angeles artist said he hopes viewers of his paintings see 'a visual performance that wants to talk to them and doesn't hold back.'

Lari Pittman creates richly symbolic works that embrace the decorative, at times resembling graphic design, without abandoning conceptual depth.

His imagery—including eggs, owls, flowers, and eyes—can seem like clues waiting to be deciphered, but meanings often reveal as much about the viewer as they do the artist.

On 17 August, Shanghai's Long Museum will unveil Asia's first institutional survey of Pittman's works. The exhibition follows the artist's South Korean debut at Lehmann Maupin Seoul in 2022.

Magic Realism brings together over 30 paintings and drawings created by Pittman in the past decade, including six works held in Long Museum's permanent collection. The show is curated by L.A.-based Rochelle Steiner and runs until 20 October.

We spoke to Pittman on the evolution of his visual language, drawing inspiration from feminist art, and how he hopes to connect with audiences in Shanghai.

Having studied at CalArts, taught at UCLA, and frequently exhibited in Los Angeles, you are strongly associated with the city. What does it mean to show in Shanghai?

You can tell I'm not an up-and-coming artist—I'm a senior artist—but when Lehmann Maupin started opening up an audience for my work in Asia it was something I'd never thought would happen. I saw the incredible interest in collectors from China, Indonesia, Singapore, and Seoul and this strong response was amazing. It kind of took me off guard.

It's a wonderful opportunity to show in the Long Museum. It looks enormous and is this brutalist, concrete architecture but I've been able to figure out how to use the space.

What did you want to achieve with Magic Realism?

I was thinking about what could be a shared commonality between Shanghai and Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the second largest city in America, but it is also the least Eurocentric in its identity and its history. Growing up as an artist in Los Angeles, we don't have the weight of that history.

For Magic Realism, Rochelle and I also didn't want to weigh down the audience in this endless history of an older person. We decided to present works from the last 12 years and it's an attempt to show someone who is 72 years old as simply a contemporary artist.

In my work, that visual performance of a cacophony and a simultaneity of events might make sense to modern Asian cities like Shanghai as well.

Your works feature so many different motifs and techniques, yet they have their own distinct style. What's stayed constant in your practice and what has evolved?

When I was studying at CalArts I thought how could I make a painting in the '70s when painting was really dead and out of fashion? The question I really had to ask myself was what don't we see in painting? Those things started appearing in my work—the decorative arts, television imagery, graphic arts, the applied arts—all of which I studied in the Feminist Art programme.

I wasn't officially part of the programme, but it had such an impact on me because we're not looking exclusively at the white straight male artists of Modernism.

What stayed constant is that I want my work to remain gregarious. By that I mean regardless of the person's background or the complexity of their personal narrative, I hope when they stand in front of the painting, they see a visual performance that wants to talk to them and doesn't hold back. I want my work to be available and conversational.

The variable is just simply the narrative arc of one's life, the difference between making work in your 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. I would say right now, the shift is more to philosophical thinking and less about the topicality of politics, which were very much a part of my work in the '90s during the AIDS crisis in America.

The quality that I envy most in humans is emotional intelligence. That's something which guides me – to allow viewers to trust their instincts and try to unravel what they're looking at. —[O]