Lari Pittman, the son of an American father and a Colombian mother, grew up in both Los Angeles and Colombia. He draws from elements of commercial advertising, the decorative arts, and history painting to produce large-scale works. He often loads his dense, psychologically-jarring dreamscapes  with symbolism about love, violence, death, and sex. In his fragmented images, everything happens simultaneously, such as joy and sadness, horror and humor, violence and kindness, male and female. Drawing from his feminist studies at Cal Arts in the 1908s, Pittman sees this method of working as a protest of gender expectations, contradicting, for example, that patterns and colors are gendered. He dismisses the notion that decoration or the domestic space is feminine or associated with gender, stating, "I purposefully orchestrate the work so that you have that comfortable laughter when looking at it--it's full-hearted and enjoyably internally--but it's also a laughter linked to nervousness."

Source: DMAC News May Jun Jul Aug, 2022