Shoshana Wayne Gallery

"Weaving is not just an art form, it is an endurance test. It is a way of grappling with time and memory, pulling the threads together even when the past resists. - Anne Carson Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Circumstances Held Me To Threads, an exhibition featuring works by Terri Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Anina Major, Frances Trombly, and Michelle Yi Martin. On view from May 24th to July 26th, 2025. Weaving, at its core, is a complex act, demanding not only physical dexterity but also a heightened awareness of the delicate interplay between thought, memory, and material. It is an embodied practice that transcends the mere manipulation of thread; it is a reflection of the artist’s engagement with time, space, and history. As Joan Didion aptly observed, “Weaving is not a simple thing. It’s not just the hand that moves the thread, but the mind that follows it.” Weaving requires a tension between the past and present, where every thread drawn through the loom forms an intricate connection between memory and material, between individual and collective histories. In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, the artists delve into this profound act of connection, exploring the tactile beauty of fibers as they intertwine to form patterns that mirror the complexity of lived experience. These artists challenge and expand the traditional practice of weaving, drawing upon the metaphorical weight of the process itself. The act of weaving becomes an engagement with both personal and political realms, where materials become vessels of identity, culture, and memory. Michelle Yi Martin and Frances Trombly push the boundaries of textile and fiber to examine the intricate relationships between the corporeal and the conceptual. Their work emphasizes the physicality of weaving, focusing on the act of binding, pulling, and stretching materials in ways that reveal the fragility and resilience inherent within the fibers themselves. Sabrina Gschwandtner interrogates the historical canon of craft, reframing archival media to explore how weaving and its associated forms have been shaped by gendered perspectives. Her work challenges traditional perceptions, questioning both the aesthetics and politics embedded in the act of making. Terri Friedman considers her fabric works paintings, blurring the line between mediums through vibrant compositions that fuse gesture and texture. Anina Major’s and Gil Yefman’s works reimagine the act of weaving through the lens of personal and cultural memory, emphasizing hybridity and transformation. These artists draw on diasporic histories, where the very act of weaving becomes a means of negotiating new forms of identity and resilience. Their works underscore weaving as a force that binds not just threads but also histories and individuals, creating new connections between past and present. In Circumstances Held Me To Threads, weaving is not merely a technical process; it becomes an act of endurance and reflection, of stretching the boundaries between past experiences and contemporary realities. Through this exhibition, the artists invite the viewer to witness how the act of weaving becomes a transformative process, one that is at once fragile and enduring, intimately tied to both the body and the world around us.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Never-Ending Journey, on view from March 29 – May 17, 2025. This exhibition will present a selection of works by Dinh Q. Lê, including his monumental installation Một Cõi Đi Về alongside a collection of photographic weavings from the Reamker series, which constitute the artist's final pieces. Dinh Q. Lê's Một Cõi Đi Về (translated as "spending one’s life trying to find one’s way home") is a poignant exploration of memory, migration, and the deep connection between personal history and cultural identity. Titled after a beloved Vietnamese song, the installation brings together 1,500 vernacular photographs sourced from secondhand stores in Vietnam. These images, stitched into a monumental 14 x 20-foot work, invite viewers to reflect on mid-20th-century Vietnamese history and the diaspora that emerged in the wake of the Cambodian Genocide. Lê's archival approach and expansive scale transform these intimate snapshots into a collective memory, blurring the lines between personal and historical narratives and creating a powerful meditation on belonging and loss. Lê’s life—shaped by displacement, survival, and trauma—was marked by his escape from Vietnam as a refugee in 1979, after surviving the Khmer Rouge’s brutal invasion. His work engaged with universal themes of survival, cultural dislocation, and the lasting impacts of war. Merging the personal, the historical, and the mythological, Lê’s practice transcended cultural boundaries, offering reflections on shared experiences of loss and displacement that continue to shape both individual lives and collective histories. In his final works, Lê revisited core themes of his practice, continuing his exploration of historical memory, cultural identity, and trauma. These photographic weavings juxtapose images from the Reamker, Cambodia’s version of the Ramayana, with portraits of prisoners from the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The Reamker murals, photographed by Lê in their deteriorating state at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, symbolize Cambodia’s once-thriving cultural heritage, now overshadowed by the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime. Lê’s engagement with these murals highlights the ongoing dialogue between Cambodia’s ancient artistic traditions and the violent ruptures of its modern history. This body of work encapsulates Lê’s investigation into how historical trauma reverberates across generations. By intertwining mythological and historical elements, Lê invited viewers to confront the complexities of identity and how cultural narratives are shaped by violence, survival, and time. These final works underscore his broader engagement with the legacies of war, the negotiation of memory, and the resilience of cultural identity within diasporic and post-conflict contexts. In presenting both the grandeur of Cambodia’s ancient art and the brutal scars left by its recent past, Lê offers a profound meditation on the intersections of history, mythology, and human endurance. Dinh Q. Lê has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally at prestigious venues including: Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Mori Art Museum, Japan; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassell, Germany; and the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Solo exhibitions include: Projects 93: Dinh Q. Lê (MoMA, New York), True Journey Is Return (San Jose Museum of Art, California), Photographing the thread of memory (Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France), and Memory for Tomorrow (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Fukuoka Asian Art and the Mori Museum in Japan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art amongst many others. Lê has been the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Award and the Prince Claus Fund for Cultural and Development amongst others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is excited to announce Jeanne Silverthorne’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. They Will Be Like Shadows delves into her enduring preoccupation with the corporeal and the elusive self—a fragmented presence that navigates the studio as much as the wider world. Her sculptures embody a spectrum of existence, from the purity of infancy to the shadows of old age, intertwining traces of the grotesque and the tender. This tension finds resonance in the exhibition’s literary epigraphs: Clarice Lispector’s ethereal “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating,” and Angela Carter’s haunting “She herself is a haunted house. Her ancestors... come and peer out of the windows of her eyes.” While alluding to her own family history, Silverthorne’s works remain rooted in her decades-long inquiry into the studio as a site of labor, creation, and existential reckoning. Familiar objects—bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-fours, crates, hammers, and dollies—become uncanny relics, meticulously cast in rubber, the material central to her practice since the mid-1980s. These familiar objects, transformed into uncanny relics, invite a meditation on the boundaries between the material and the metaphysical, where labor, creation, and memory intertwine. The exhibition unfolds as a fragmented narrative that resists resolution. A sleeping infant rests atop a vast white cloud (And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began); a diminutive portrait of Silverthorne’s mother stands on a book (Mom on Book) or beneath an overhanging cloud (Mom Under a Cloud II); a miniature figure of a studio worker, hammer in hand, pauses in mid-motion (End of Day); and a deflated, life-sized likeness of the artist herself stretches across the floor (Banshee). These sculptures evoke a sense of intimate vulnerability while gesturing toward broader existential themes. Silverthorne’s sparse literary allusions and three-dimensional punctuation marks underscore the enigmatic quality of her work, weaving together memory, labor, and selfhood. Rendered in a muted palette of gray, black, cream, and titanium buff, the works shift tonally from brooding meditations on mortality, to moments of absurdity, doubling, and shifts in scale, to serene depictions of unguarded innocence. The subdued colors act as a unifying thread, while their emotional resonance oscillates between humor and melancholy, evoking a world where contradictions coexist in delicate equilibrium. Jeanne Silverthorne holds a BA and MA from Temple University. Her one-person museum exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Whitney Museum of Art, P.S.1, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the University of Kentucky Museum, as well as galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Seoul, Verona, and Ireland. Her work is in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Denver Art Museum, SFMoMA, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Tang Museum, among others. Silverthorne has been featured in publications like the New York Times, Artforum, and Sculpture Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is currently on view at the Norton Museum's Strike Fast, Dance Lightly (October 2024–March 2025) and will be featured in Anonymous Was a Woman: The First Twenty-Five Years at the Grey Art Museum (April–July 2025).

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Shiva Ahmadi: Tangle, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from October 19th through December 14th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 19th, from 4-6pm. Ahmadi masterfully uses her formal skills to invigorate challenging subject matter, blending free-flowing strokes with vibrant bursts of color to captivate viewers through unexpected contrasts—whether in sculpture, painting, or animation. Painting serves as her vehicle for truth-telling, where luminous colors and mystical figures intertwine with violent imagery to illuminate pressing global issues such as migration, war, and the brutal treatment of marginalized people. Tangle features her new works, which focus on female figures immersed in fantastical landscapes of land and water." Ahmadi's technical mastery of watercolor—a medium celebrated for its unpredictability—allows her to explore themes of covering and uncovering. By incorporating screenprints into her paintings, she adds temporal and physical layers, creating a dynamic dialogue between the real and the imagined. Through her inclusion of ruins or clues to a deeper story, Ahmadi encourages viewers to probe beneath the surface of the narratives we inherit, from ancient myths to childhood memories to the modern news cycle. Born in Tehran, Iran, Ahmadi grew up in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution (1979) and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988). The roles imposed on women in Iranian society, including the mandate to wear the hijab, were formative influences on her development as both a woman and an artist. Drawing from mythological figures such as Medusa and Artemis—who symbolize the enduring strength of women despite societal oppression—Ahmadi portrays women in her paintings in positions of physical struggle, contending with vicious animals, walking through fire, and being weighed down by the weight of their own hair, bodies, and surroundings. Her paintings examine the history of patriarchy's surveillance and control over women's bodies, from the mandatory hijab in her homeland to the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in her adopted country, the United States. In her Pressure Cooker series, Ahmadi explores the transformation of domestic objects into instruments of violence. Traditionally seen as a symbol of nourishment and care, the pressure cooker has been repurposed in terrorist attacks as a bomb, recontextualizing it as a tool of brutality. Her commentary on women's autonomy extends into this series, where intricate intaglio hand-etching celebrates the domestic role of this everyday object. By aesthetically enhancing the pressure cooker, she invites viewers to confront the unsettling juxtaposition of war and violence against the mundane comfort of its domestic function. Ahmadi's latest animation, Marooned, delves into the destabilizing effects of politics and war on ordinary people, with a particular focus on the struggles of immigrants and refugees. Composed of 5,172 hand-painted frames, the animation tells the story of people working tirelessly to build a pathway of large rocks leading to a stranded oil tanker in the ocean. As they near completion, ominous figures emerge and seize the tanker, leaving them with nothing. Ahmadi has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Manetti Shrem Museum in CA (2024), The Rubin Museum in New York City (2021), the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, CA (2017), the Asia Society Museum in New York City (2014), and the College of Wooster Art Museum in Wooster, OH (2012). In addition to holding regular solo exhibitions at galleries in NYC, LA, London and San Francisco, her works have been included in many curated museum group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Notable shows include the "Rising Sun" at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, (2023) "Being and Belonging" at the Ontario Museum of Arts in Toronto, Canada (2023) “Epic Iran” in Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK (2023); “A Boundless Drop in A Boundless Ocean” Orlando Museum of Art in Orlando, Florida (2021), Catastrophe and the Power of Art”, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019), “Revolution Generations”, Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2019) among others. Ahmadi’s work is part of permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Jose Museum of Arts; the Crocker Art Museum; the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Asia Society Museum in New York; the Manetti Shrem Museum in California; the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago; the Grey Art Museum in New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University; The Morgan Library and Museum in New York; the Farjam Collection in Dubai; the TDIC Corporate Collection in Abu Dhabi; and the private collection of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Anna Lukashevsky: The New Immigrants. This is the Haifa-based artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view June 29th through August 17th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 29th from 4-6pm. Anna Lukashevsky is interested in the psychological and sociological aspects of the traumatic events, especially in portraits. Over the past two years, she has painted portraits of new immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Lukashevsky’s subjects abandoned comfortable lives in Russia because their beliefs were no longer tolerated in the place they called home. The cast of artists, writers, journalists, and filmmakers seen in Lukashevsky’s paintings make up a fraction of the 70,000+ Russian and Ukrainian immigrants to Israel, and each portrait relays the subject’s story. As Lukashevsky speaks with her subjects during lengthy portraiture sessions, their experiences transform her images from an archetype to an individual. The New Immigrants project began in 2022 with paintings of Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, but after October 7th Lukashevsky was instilled with a desire to capture the emotional impact of Israel’s war against Hamas. These new portraits depict the trauma, depression, and sadness that Israelis have felt since the war with Hamas began. Lukashevsky imbues her paintings with a sense of empathy and fear, portraying an uncertain future and viewing the work as warning signals to the cultural world. As an immigrant from the USSR herself, Lukashevsky has felt an intrinsic connection to her subjects, and viewed herself as an outsider in the Israeli cultural world. Lukashevsky is a part of the New Barbizon Group, a collective of five Israeli painters born in the USSR who offer a contemporary version of the tradition of painting en plein air. Following in the footsteps of the 19th century Barbizon School, the artists attempt to hold a mirror to contemporary life and highlight the lived experiences of those around them. In The New Immigrants, Lukashevsky utilizes this philosophy to represent the beauty and trauma of the present through those living in it. By deeply engaging with and sharing the stories of her subjects, the artist humanizes the refugee crisis and the effects of war. Anna Lukashevsky was born in Vilnius, Lithuania and studied at HaMidrasha Art School, Israel. She has had solo exhibitions at the Haifa Museum of Art, and Bat Yam Museum of Art. Lukashevsky’s work can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Tel Aviv Museum; Haifa Museum, Israel; and numerous private collections.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Zadok Ben-David: From Here, There, and Everywhere. This is the London and Portugal-based artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm. From Here, There, and Everywhere contains over one hundred hand-cut aluminum sculptures from Ben-David’s ongoing series People I Saw But Never Met (2015-present), bringing together a heterogeneous cast of characters based on real people. Each work is inspired by a passerby the artist discreetly photographed while traveling, sketching their likeness before rendering the drawing in aluminum. The installation includes strangers from Europe, the United States, South America, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica in an attempt to chronicle the breadth of the human experience. A metaphor for the diversity of our world’s population, Ben-David’s sculptures materialize our shared humanity, allowing viewers to empathize with strangers from around the globe. People I Saw But Never Met has travelled the world and grown with each presentation, as the artist adds new figures for each exhibition. The work has been shown in Japan, Portugal, Siberia, Ecuador, Tel Aviv, Australia, and South Korea; and now includes over 8,000 sculptures. During the COVID-19 pandemic, People I Saw But Never Met took on a new meaning, becoming a powerful symbol for humanity’s isolation and communication and demonstrating that we are more alike than different. Work in From Here, There, and Everywhere encompasses the 9+ years of Ben-David’s series, placing early work in conversation with new sculptures. Against the backdrop of environmental disasters, wars, and global crises that threaten humanity’s continued survival, Zadok Ben-David presents a message of optimism and hope. A lack of hierarchy between the sculptures gives dignity and respect towards every stranger whose likeness is captured, regardless of origin. Ben-David believes communication and empathy are the solution to many of the problems humanity faces, and the installation visualizes human beings as a collective, emphasizing that our similarities are greater than our differences. Zadok Ben-David lives and works in London and Portugal. He has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and Asia including: Itchimbia Cultural Center, Ecuador; Kew Gardens, London; Centro de Arte Contemporanae Graca Morais, Bragança, Portugal; Kenpoku Art Festival, Irabaki Prefecture, Japan; The Art Gallery of Uzbekistan, Tashkent; Singapore Botanical Gardens; and The Tel Aviv Museum amongst many others. Ben-David has participated in group exhibitions, biennials, and museum shows worldwide including recently at The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; Arts Maebashi, Japan; and Breda Photo Biennial, Netherlands (2020). Additionally, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Cerveira Internatonal Art Biennale Cerveira, Cerveira, Portugal (2022, 2020); Busan Biennial, South Korea (2010); Wonder Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2008); and the Venice Biennale, Italy (1988). His art can be found in the collections of museums and public sites across Europe, East Asia, Australia and America including: Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands; among others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Brad Spence: FantasyBoatLoveIsland. This is the California-based artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 18th through June 22nd, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, May 18th from 4-6pm. This series takes the fantasy of tropical romantic getaways as the subject of inquiry and the backdrop for painterly gestures. The canvases are mostly improvisations, composed in solitude, yet picturing moments of social ceremony, celebration and excess. Figures are suggested through layers of finger-painting that upon close inspection dissolve into primitive marks. Airbrushed sprays of iridescent pigment bath these presences in colored lights. There is a prevailing lack of clarity mixing memory and its erasure with collaged rectangles hinting at photographic mementos that fail to come into focus. The compositions suggest tsunamis of conflicting emotions in works that are both fantasies and mediations on the nature of fantasy. The identities of the social events pictured are elusive and changing, shifting between celebrations, rites of passage and rituals of the carnal and carnivalesque. These moment of revelry and abandon are as well shadowed by crisis both personal and global. Entertained here are unmoored desires, like the decadent dreams of tourists. In the end the place fantasy shipwrecks upon empty shores is where transcendence can begin. Meanwhile an endless procession of mud baths, mediation retreats, nightclubs, destination weddings, coverbands, cruiseships, bachelorette parties, hottubs, beach fireworks and the threat of a morning light with no Advil at the bottom of the purse. Brad Spence holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BA from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL. Spence lives and works in Los Angeles and is an Associate Professor of painting at California State University, San Bernardino. Solo exhibitions include CSUSB Gallery, San Bernadino, CA; Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernadino, CA; and University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, Long Beach, CA. Spence’s work has been included in group shows in venues such as the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; Centre d’art Passerelle, Brest, France; USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Luckman Gallery, Cal State LA, Los Angeles, CA.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Yveline Tropéa’s work in the United States: Between Two Worlds. The exhibition will be on view April 6th through May 11th, 2024, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 6th from 4-6pm. Drawing inspiration from dreams and folklore, Yveline Tropéa creates paintings that defy explanation. A man and woman are wedded on a floating slug, an eyeball-shaped kite pulls miniature figures out of frame, and creatures melt into each other in Tropéa’s surreal scenes. The artist abandons notions of perspective and scale to produce dream-like compositions against backgrounds resembling cosmic ripples or oceans of sand. Working between Paris and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Tropéa’s paintings are influenced by the myriad of cultures and traditions that surround her. Tropéa transcribes events from everyday life and mythology into her canvases, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible. Tropéa skillfully mixes hand-beading and embroidery, hiding motifs in plain sight and creating kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Her process begins with free drawing, autonomously transcribing dreams and fantasies onto paper. The artist digitally enlarges the image and maps out color choices and patterns for beading and embroidery. Selections of glass beads and threads draw from local beading techniques and source material from craftspeople in Ouagadougou. Tropéa charts out the direction of each strand, resulting in richly textured imagery that animates the mystical narratives. Combining traditional materials with a surrealist and spiritual approach to production allows Tropéa to create a world ruled by irrationality, which we are invited into. Much like contemporary life, Tropéa’s work exists in a space of ambiguity, but by venturing into these dream-like images viewers can find inspiration and meaning, widening their own worlds in the process. Yveline Tropéa (b. 1962) was born in France and lives and works between Paris and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Tropéa’s work has been included in exhibitions at Centre André Malraux, Agen, France; Ouagadougou Biennial, Burkina Faso; Il giardino di Daniel Spoerri, Seggiano, Italy; Château de Montbron, Montbron, France; Biso Biennial, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; Institut Français de Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Musée de la toile de Jouy, Jouy en Josas, France, among others.

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present The Gravity of Color by Rachel Lachowicz. This is the Los Angeles-based artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view February 3rd through March 16th, 2024, with an opening reception Saturday, February 3rd from 4-6pm. Lachowicz’s newest body of work utilizes materiality as a lens to examine our reality through color and geometric abstraction. Materiality has been a through line in Lachowicz’s work, and through her use of cosmetics the artist attempts to break down strict and outdated binaries of gender. Where previous works have addressed these topics through direct representation and interpretations of the western art historical canon, Lachowicz has shifted her focus to geometric abstraction in an effort to make sense of the systems and laws which define our existence. Many of the works in The Gravity of Color were born from the artist’s interest in quantum physics and cosmology, and showcase a desire to illustrate the intangible. Works like Time (2024), Deep Weave (2024), and Radiofrequency (2024) are abstract representations of longitudinal waves, multiverse theory, and radiofrequency radiation. Depicting these monumental ideas through her signature medium of pressed-eyeshadow allows Lachowicz to examine them at a granular level, shifting the scale to something relatable. Etymology further strengthens a connection between cosmetics and cosmology, as both words share the Greek root of cosmos/kosmos. This shared root roughly translates to ‘order’ or ‘proper arrangement’ and by representing the forces which order our universe through makeup, Lachowicz illuminates and strengthens these connections. Lachowicz’s engagement in geometric abstraction and desire to experiment with materials situates her in a lineage of California artists stretching back to the 1950’s. Abstract eyeshadow pieces in the gallery’s main space are reminiscent of works by Southern California’s Abstract Classicists, while also drawing inspiration from Victor Vasarely and Joseph Albers. In the second gallery, Lachowicz has created two sculptures: Granularity of Space (2024) and Packets of Light (Yellow Field) (2024), which feature powder-coated eyeshadow tins. The two works evoke the Finish Fetish movement of the 1960’s, but the artist’s decision to combine cosmetic tins with industrial material puts a feminist spin on this male-dominated movement. While previous exhibitions sought to directly recreate iconic works of art, works in The Gravity of Color are wholly original outputs. Material relationships lie at the center of Lachowicz’s newest pieces, and by showing the links between paint and cosmetics the artist further blurs the line between the two. While materiality has always been central to her practice, recent work sees Lachowicz taking this interest a step further and creating ‘hybrid’ pieces that combine lipstick and oil paint. These are unlike the lipstick-coated canvases and sculptures present in past bodies of work, and appear closer to gestural works of abstract painting than anything Lachowicz has created before. Powder-coating sculptures of enlarged eyeshadow tins furthers the artist’s explorations of material relationships, as Lachowicz sees a link between the industrial practice and her use of eyeshadow powder as paint. A guiding principle of Lachowicz’s work is her use of ‘other’ materials, which she sees as a way to ‘other’ her oeuvre within the art world due to the materials she employs. In The Gravity of Color, Lachowicz continues to make a case for the inclusion of cosmetics as a form of painting, and demonstrates how structurally similar the two mediums are. As Lachowicz investigates the makeup of our universe in her signature medium of lipstick and eyeshadow, she represents larger-than-life ideas on a human scale. Varying relationships between scale lie at the heart of The Gravity of Color, and by shedding light on these relationships Lachowicz helps viewers ask philosophical and scientific questions about the nature of our existence. The eyeshadow dust that comprises the colors in Lachowicz’s work is not unlike the cosmic dust which forms our universe, and illustrating this allows us to see the gravity that color holds. Rachel Lachowicz (b. 1964) lives and works in Santa Monica, CA. She received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is currently a professor of studio art at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Her work is currently included in ‘Inner Worlds: Sigmund Freud and Art’ at Kunsthalle Tübingen in Tübingen, Germany. Lachowicz has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; ICA, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Tianjin, China; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; New Museum, New York City; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Venice Bienanale (1993). Her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, among many others.