The Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang-si, Jeollanam-do, South Korea is pleased to present the first museum survey in South Korea by celebrated Los Angeles-based painter Lari Pittman. Curated by Rochelle Steiner, Mirror & Metaphor features approximately 40 paintings and drawings created over the past 14 years. The exhibition underscores the artist’s ongoing exploration in themes related to modern life, including regeneration and optimistic renewal in 21st century society. On this occasion, works from seven key series will be brought together for the first time: Thought-form of the inverse and converse of hope (2012); Caprichos (2015); Nocturnes (2015); Iris Shots Opening and Closing (2020); Diorama and Vanitas (2021); Cities with Egg Monuments: Luminous (2022); and Sparkling City With Egg Monuments (2023). The earliest work, Grand Tour (2011) reveals the artist’s interest in ideas across time and place, emulating previous eras of world travel. Opening on March 18, 2025, the exhibition sheds light on Pittman’s prolific output and the evolution of his work over the last decade.
“I am so honored and grateful that my work is being shown at The Jeonnam Museum of Art,” said Pittman. I am thrilled to return to South Korea following my first solo exhibition in the country in 2022, where I presented a new body of work at Lehmann Maupin’s gallery space in Seoul. This exhibition is incredibly exciting and unique for me since it will be the first time that audiences in South Korea have the opportunity to experience my work holistically at this scale.”
Throughout his illustrious four-decade career, Pittman has developed a distinct visual language that has established him as one of the most significant painters of our generation. Pittman’s signature, densely layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols, a compilation of varied painting techniques, unique color combinations, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman has had numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world including a major retrospective at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2019 that was accompanied by an expansive publication. His work has also been included in the Whitney Biennial (1993, 1995, 1997), Documenta (1997), and the Venice Biennale (2003), among other acclaimed shows. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince a shift in focus towards interior spaces, including domestic and psychological subjects.
In Mirror & Metaphor, the visual motif of eggs, which has appeared in Pittman's work since the mid-1980s, is seen consistently. This form is integrated into nightscapes and cityscapes; it appears as monuments and as part of nature scenes, ready to hatch into life. Eggs are part of the artist's utopian perspective: a feminized and generative vision of the world rooted in the exuberance of life. Filled with eggs in a variety of sizes and guises, these paintings serve as love letters to the possibilities of life in the twenty-first century, including optimism and renewal. Another key motif is the nocturne or night-time scenes, which appear in both black- and-white works and as a motif in the bold multicolor works. Illuminated lamps and other references to twilight convey the mysteries of evening time.
“Lari Pittman’s work is complex, engaging, challenging, and beautiful all at the same time,” said Steiner. “He draws together ideas from art, literature, history, and his imagination to create uniquely exuberant paintings and drawings. They bring together ideas and images that lead us to consider the past, present and future, and how they are intertwined.”
Highlights from the exhibition include selections from Pittman’s recent bodies of work Luminous: Cities with Egg Monuments and Sparkling Cities with Egg Monuments, which were presented at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Seoul (2022) and in New York (2023), respectively. Created during the global pandemic between 2020-2022, these bodies of work include a number of monumentally scaled paintings that are characterized by the artist's unique visual aesthetic containing dense, interwoven imagery in vibrant colors. His paintings have consistently explored topics including life, death, love, sex, consumerism, and capitalism. Here, Pittman approaches such themes through the lens of isolation and rebirth, looking both backward and forward in time. The history of decoration is another key element in Pittman’s work, deployed not only for visual patterning but as subject matter itself. Here, it appears as complex ornamentation and a consideration of aesthetics. Additional highlights include works from the artist’s Caprichos (2015) series in which Pittman creates a fictive introduction of Francisco Goya and poet Emily Dickinson, both of which address human brutality and mortality in their work. Pittman looks back and then deploys these themes in this series of works that forecast many of the social issues of today’s society.
Together, the works on view demonstrate the conceptual strategies and rigor that underpin Pittman’s process. In each work, he begins with the title and then maps visual structure, which he refers to as the work's architecture; from there, he populates his canvases with imagery related to his thematic concerns. Recently, Pittman has presented meditations on modern life, ranging from isolation to extravagance. His otherworldly settings are suggestive of the urbanity of cityscapes and the idiosyncrasies of nature. Teeming with life and visual excess, the canvases on view in Mirror & Metaphor invite viewers to fantasize about the exuberance and hope for the future.