3311 East Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA
Saturday, April 26 at 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Ends May 31, 2025
Kat Lowish: Short Stories
de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Short Stories, the debut solo exhibition of British born, New York-based artist Kat Lowish. Comprising a suite of meticulously rendered paintings, the exhibition unfolds like a sequence of cinematic stills—each frame charged with intimacy, absence, and the quiet drama of ritual.
Lowish’s work invites viewers to linger on the edge of a narrative, suspended in the ambiguity between public and private. Never revealing a full face, the artist constructs her tableaux around obscured identities and fragmented bodies. In one painting, a figure's hand languidly brushes against a curtain hem as wine pools across a tiled floor; in another, a woman crumples facedown on a parquet floor, her body a quiet punctuation mark against a backdrop of blood-red drapery.
To call the work voyeuristic would be too easy—Lowish instead draws attention to the very nature of looking. Through compositions that echo the framing devices of film and theater—curtains, corridors, mirrors—she reflects on the painter’s gaze and the viewer’s complicity. In Myselves, painted masks lie scattered on the floor beneath a table, suggesting the roles we perform and the faces we choose (or refuse) to show.
Textiles recur throughout: a lilac dress sequined like a night sky, a pair of white slippers adorned with transparent bows, or a towel being shed next to the pool. These domestic details are not incidental—they are quietly central to Lowish’s world, anchoring her work in the sensual realm of lived experience. Beauty here is not ornamental, but evidentiary. It is the texture of memory, the trace of a presence, and the echo of an unseen drama.
ABOUT KAT LOWISH
Kat Lowish (b. 1989, London, UK) lives and works in New York. She received her Bachelor's degree in German and French Studies from University College London and her MFA at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions Moosey, London UK; Myriam Chair, Paris, Badr El Jundi, Madrid. de boer, Los Angeles; Half Gallery, New York, NY and Thierry Goldberg, New York; NY.
_______________________________________________________________
Alex McQuilkin: Obviously, Doctor
de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Obviously, Doctor, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Alex McQuilkin. Known for her rigorously conceptual yet deeply personal approach, McQuilkin’s new paintings excavate the interwoven threads of gendered performance, domestic aesthetics, and media archetypes. Through a deft juxtaposition of found imagery and wallpaper motifs, she stages an inquiry into the construction and instability of feminine identity in contemporary culture.
Rendered in labor-intensive, muted monochrome palettes, McQuilkin’s paintings isolate and recontextualize visual tropes drawn from film stills, advertisements, Pinterest boards, and the artist’s own girlhood bedrooms. From the pastel fragility of floral wallpaper to the iconic image of Lolita’s heart-shaped sunglasses, these works unmask the unseen architecture of influence embedded within our visual environments. What appears innocent—chintz prints, hair bows, ballerina slippers—becomes charged with unease, memory, and critique.
Drawing inspiration from theorists such as Legacy Russell, McQuilkin aligns her practice with a glitch feminist ethos: a refusal to perform, a breakdown of media as resistance. Her paintings intentionally reveal their own construction—unfinished trompe-l’oeil borders, interrupted labor, digital compression marks—suggesting not only the artifice of the image, but the artifice of the roles the images project and perpetuate. As in Not Winning an Unwinnable Game is Not the Same as Failing, the fragility of analog and digital simulations alike underscores the impossibility of living up to their coded ideals. Each work in the exhibition functions as a double exposure: a nostalgic echo of aspirational femininity and a critical dismantling of its machinery. In #hysterical, a viral image of performance artist Marthe Fortun—captured mid-lecture with milk leaking through her shirt—becomes a quietly radical act of embodied refusal, tenderness, and truth.
McQuilkin’s practice is not about nostalgia, but about recognition: of the subtle indoctrinations we live with, and of the ways we might undo them. By suturing the decorative with the digital, and labor with critique, the exhibition opens a space to reconsider how identity is curated, performed, and sometimes—when we’re lucky—reclaimed.
ABOUT ALEX McQUILKIN
Alex McQuilkin combines psychoanalysis, maudlin sentimentality, dark humor, and deep sincerity in her videos, drawings, objects, and installations, through which she explores the construction of female identity in Western culture. McQuilkin’s work has been exhibited internationally since 2000. Her paintings, drawings, videos and sculptures explore themes such as the role of cultural aesthetics in defining female identity and the power structures embedded within artifice. McQuilkin has had solo exhibitions de boer, Los Angeles; Georgetown University Museum, Washington D.C.; Plymouth Rock, Zurich; Marvelli Gallery, New York; and Galerie Adler, Frankfurt. Group exhibitions include those at MoMA PS1, New York; KW Institute, Berlin; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Konig Gallery, London; Tick Tack Gallery, Antwerp; Marlborough, New York; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville; McQuilkin’s work has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Village Voice, FlashArt, Art Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University.