Events/
Lari Pittman

The Society for Contemporary Art is proud to announce LARI PITTMAN Tuesday, February 23, 1999. Lari Pittman, a Los Angeles-based painter, has a fresh and unique approach to contemporary painting. In contrast to the cool and reserved aesthetic of conceptual and minimalist art, Pittman's vibrantly colored paintings combine figuration and abstraction in a radical way, creating decorative masterpieces containing subversive and provocative narratives. In the work, he weaves together abstract elements from nature with realms of popular culture, employing cartoons, graphic symbols, textual slogans, abstract geometrical forms, and wallpaper and fabric patterns. Pittman radically displaces the motifs so that images and symbols recontextualize each other, twisting the social and psychological meanings of diverse symbols. In his synthesis of figuration and abstraction, Pittman charges the paintings with a connection to real life that transcends both the coy social critiques of much Pop art and the simplistic stridency of recent political art. His "bittersweet" aesthetic demands the simultaneous recognition of life and death, health and illness, survival and annihilation. By holding on to seeming opposites, Pittman manages to reassert content in painting, melding formal complexities of abstraction with the weight of social and moral concerns. (Excerpted from "Flash and Filigree" by Michael Duncan, Art In America, December 1996) Lari Pittman received his BFA (1974) and his MFA (1976) at the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, California. He has had two recent major mid-career museum exhibitions: "Lari Pittman," curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to London, Geneva, Houston and Washington, D.C., and "Works on Paper, 1982-1995," curated by the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating and colorful evening!