Lari Pittman

(American, born 1952)

Lari Pittman is a contemporary American artist best known for his collage-like paintings and prints which integrate multiple pictorial languages into a single work. Melding advertisements, gestural abstraction, Surrealism, Victorian silhouettes, and Folk art, the artist revels in dichotomies of ugliness and beauty, chaos and calm. Like the artist Philip Taafe, Pittman takes on grandiose ideas of death, transcendence, and semiotics in a way both light hearted and profound. “I want to offer a painting that somehow the viewer has to stand in front of it and almost not believe it,” he said of his work. “But in the act of not believing it, what they’re actually seeing, they get swept away in it.” Born in 1952 in Los Angeles, CA, Pittman received both his BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He has gone on to be included in four Whitney Biennials and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Pittman continues to live and work in Los Angeles, CA with his partner Roy Dowell. Today, his works are in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Stedlijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.