Lari Pittman

Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are no apparent condition issues with this work. This work has not been viewed under Ultraviolet light. Unframed.
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Lari Pittman, a Los Angeles native, received both his BFA (1974) and MFA (1976) from California Institute of the Arts and has remained an active member of the LA art scene throughout his life. His work has been exhibited widely at renowned museums both locally and globally, including significant shows at MOCA such as Constructing a History: A Focus on MOCA's Permanent Collection in 1990 and more recently, The Artist’s Museum in 2010 – 2011. It is thus fitting that he has generously volunteered to participate with this donation in the Artists for MOCA benefit.

Pittman’s work fuses a vibrant balance of abstraction, figuration, decoration and complex symbolism in a sophisticated manner that both engages and opposes the dominant trends of today’s contemporary art. With his densely layered surfaces, the artist expertly overthrows conventional notions of what we come to expect when considering perspective, subject matter, and composition in contemporary painting. Bursting with both aesthetic appeal and sensory challenges, Pittman’s work rebels against rigid dichotomies, demonstrating the complementary nature between classic couplings such as beauty and chaos or agony and bliss.

With A Transcendent Mutability Produced by Camouflage, Lari Pittman’s dazzlingly feverish composition toes the line between figurative representation and ornate abstraction. By building a complex spatial construction with a myriad of colliding images, Pittman gives his composition an intriguing depth both visually and conceptually. Drawing from a surplus of visual references as inspiration, Pittman’s work becomes simultaneously reminiscent of decorative, folk, and commercial traditions while also maintaining a refined art historically relevant impact.

When viewing  A Transcendent Mutability Produced by Camouflage, with its incredible dimensionality, one does not look merely at it, but rather through it. The artist’s invented imagery blends with repurposed iconography to visually recede into and extend out from the artwork’s surface. Looking to the standing figure along the picture’s left-hand side, issues of foreground and background become confused as the figure’s arm extends boldly outward towards the viewer while his face dissolves softly into its delicately patterned surroundings. As art critic David Pagel once observed, “frenzied yet sophisticated, Pittman’s operatic pictures propose that the world’s complexity does not override passion, sincerity, and individuality.” (David Pagel, "Lari Pittman," BOMB Magazine, Winter, 1991)

Robert Rauschenberg
Centennial Certificate MMA, 1969
Art © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and ULAE/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY