Narrative Painting in Los Angeles
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Building B3, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Saturday, July 20 at 5:00 PM 7:00 PM
Ends Aug 31, 2019
From fires to freeways, earthquakes to race relations, The Day of the Locust to Play It As It Lays, the story of Los Angeles can be sinister, transient, and apocalyptic, but it is also opportunistic, perpetually sunny, and rooted in dreaming. Mythmaking and storytelling are at the core of our creative culture and this impulse drives a number of contemporary painters whose work could be characterized as L.A. Narrative Painting. The exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery will examine the work of a dozen artists from Southern California who use painting to tell a story through images, allegories and symbols. The telling of stories through the visual arts can be traced back to the beginnings of civilization, but the modern idea was defined during the Renaissance by Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise “De Pictura,” in which he advises painters to acquaint themselves with poets in order to aid in their constructions of beautifully composed “historia.” Thereafter, large “history” paintings were generally regarded as the highest form of art. The term “narrative art” did not come into use until the 20th Century, by which time, abstraction and other Modernist concerns had pushed this genre of work into the background. However, in recent years artists have begun to utilize a narrative approach as a way to investigate and communicate ideas about gender, race, and politics.