Annie Lapin: Unwilded

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Unwilded, a new series of eight intimately-scaled paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Annie Lapin. This will be her third solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from September 21 through November 2. 

Lapin is known for her relentless exploration of various genres of painting, such as landscape, figuration, and abstraction. Employing visual references from a wide variety of sources, including the artist’s own photo archive, online visual media, and well-known paintings and photographs from throughout art history, her works are an amalgamation of fractured, yet familiar forms, each coalescing into a coherent depiction of our world. 

Her newest series Unwilded, unfolds over eight new paintings, each 24 x 19 inches. These works take the concept of the garden as a central theme. Historically, gardens have operated as a highly designed, controlled, and curated selection of the natural world, bent to the will of humanity’s aesthetic desires. Looking specifically at the public and private gardens of prominent families and patrons of the arts alongside the gardens of artists, these new works address the sociological and economic systems  implied by the existence of the gardens themselves and considers each garden as a node in a network of information, connected to nature, history, and personal experience. For Lapin, the expanded field of landscape is challenged with depicting how the meaning of a place is constantly in flux and how those changes impact our perception of the natural world. 

Unlike past works, the paintings in Unwilded refer to well-known sites such as Monet’s garden at Giverny, the Jardin Botanico Nacional of Chile, Cindy Sherman’s home garden, and the Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg. With the location only referenced in the painting’s title, these works transcend mere depictions of the specific gardens. Rather, each painting serves as a web of references, employing images from disparate sources that come together to form an entirely new depiction of place, one that merges abstraction, representation, and the historical residue of a specific location to form a new kind of likeness. 

Lapin begins each work by pouring paint onto the surface of her canvas. This initial gesture allows her paintings to begin with an element of chance, which then evolves into a visual armature through which Lapin develops her composition. Using this initial abstraction as a Rorschach test of sorts, Lapin will find suggestions of a landscape or body in the poured paint, which she further develops by referencing appropriated images; a process that merges a collection of digital artifacts, memories, and associations archived online. Moving between abstraction and trompe l’oeil, Lapin creates a pictorial space that is akin to our own perception: one littered with conflicting information that must logically connect. 

Building upon years of examining the way in which art history and the internet come together to shape perceptions of nature––be it through grand depictions of the American West or the collective archive of online images on social media and travel sites–– Unwilded continues the artist’s investigation into how this proliferation of images morphs our understanding of place. While shifting her attention towards a group of specific gardens, these works rely on the prism of the internet and its kaleidoscope of information to build a final, subjective image of a place, one that remains influx as it is shaped through countless depictions, stories, and myths that are themselves never fully defined.