Opening Reception March 11, 6-8pm

GAVLAK Los Angeles is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Lily Stockman. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

In this series of paintings, Stockman takes inspiration from Derek Jarman’s postmodern garden on the rugged coast of England­, a place where the inhospitable terrain is framed by geometric beds of native plants and collected stones. The gardener's challenge -to impose one's sense of order on the landscape while working within its parameters- is also the painter's. Stockman’s decidedly minimal paintings (and her own garden in the Mojave Desert) thrive on this balance.

Stockman’s work explores alliterative shapes and chromatic harmonies within her body-scaled canvases. Her biomorphic shapes are controlled, outlined, and athletic; they fill the gallery space like dancers taking their positions. Altogether the result is both meditative and exuberant– orbs of cool grey and warm ochre seem to float off the dyed linen, ecstatic outbursts of vermillion and coral, a color field of poppies.

Here Stockman is both a landscape architect of spirituality and a choreographer of bodily joy, mapping shapes and colors with a nod to Agnes Martin and Milton Avery but in a language that is all her own. Although her elegant lines appear straight from a distance, closer inspection reveals her geometry is imperfectly mirrored. She uses no guides or taping-off­, but rather a confidence of hand and mind. The wobbles and overlapping transparencies become thrills of close noticing, rewards for seductions – painting as flower, viewer as pollinator.

Lily Stockman (born 1982, Providence, RI) lives and works in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. She graduated from Harvard University in 2006 where she studied painting and botany. She completed an apprenticeship in Buddhist thangka painting at the Union of Mongolian Artists in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and in 2010 she moved to Jaipur, Rajasthan to study pigment and Mughal miniature painting with Ajay Sharma. Stockman received her MFA in studio art from New York University in 2013.

For more information concerning the exhibition, please contact Tabor Story at tabor@gavlakgallery.com, or 323-467-5700. For all press inquiries, please contact press@gavlakgallery.com.