Artist: Larissa Lockshin
Exhibition title: Violets are blue
Venue: Galería Pelaires, Mallorca, Spain
Date: June 10 – August 27, 2021
Photography: ©Roberto Ruiz, ©Grimalt de Blanch / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galería Pelaires
First exhibition in Spain of the young Canadian artist, with whom Pelaires has been collaborating for a year and a half. Her work was displayed at the group show Cadmium Lemon held at the gallery last summer, together with nine other artists, and at ARCO Lisboa 2020 (online edition).
Larissa Lockshin (1992, Toronto, Canada) is a New York based artist known for her personal and bright paintings on champagne-hued silk. At Pelaires, she will show a selection of fifteen paintings from two of the series she has been developing over the last three years. The artist is working on two apparently different lines of paintings. On the one hand, she will present the aforementioned series of works for which she is best known —works on silk, satin, which are illusory landscapes that mix dreams with reality, based on simple canvases depicting landscapes that mainly feature schematic butterflies and unreal flowers. On the other hand, she will present works inspired by French artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, she borrows depictions that Degas immortalised, such as dancers and interior settings. However, Lockshin approaches it from a different point of view, impossible in that era, much more contemporary and filtered through a fresh and young look. Also, she focuses on details that others overlooked.
Looking at her work as a whole, we can clearly see that Lockshin —despite belonging to a generation of very young artists who have developed their work amid the rise of the no longer so new technologies— has consciously taken a look back, avoiding artistic approaches that are largely reliant on the speed and filters of small screens. The question of how art can maintain its value as a physical object when most works are viewed online prompted the artist to create artworks that challenge the limits of digital reproduction, countering concepts of what painting really is through little impressionist, largely unrecognisable forms (especially in her satin works).
Overall, Lockshin challenges existing associations, categorisations, definitions and languages surrounding art. She emphasises objectivity with respect to image content. Using printing ink, acrylic, oil sticks, enamel and plaster, she creates items that reach out to the viewer and exist in the liminal space between painting and sculpture (this is the case of one of the «sculptures» to be revealed at the show).
