Independent: Lily Stockman

Charles Moffett is pleased to make its Independent Art Fair debut with a solo presentation of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Lily Stockman. This marks the first exhibition of Stockman’s work in New York since her last show with the gallery in fall 2022.

Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors: crackling orange, terra  verte, red earth, and Fra Angelico blue. Stockman’s paintings emerge from a wide range of references, from natural phenomena — vernal pools, mineral licks, birdsong, black ice — to historical devotional endeavors — Shaker gift drawings, medieval hocketing, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry meter.

Painting flat on sawhorses, Stockman builds her surfaces up in dozens of layers, diluting her pigment with walnut oil to manipulate the opacity, luminosity, and saturation of each coat of paint. More recently, the artist has begun to intensify her floating forms, grids, and frames with radiating, scumbled brush marks, giving her paintings an almost sonic quality.

At Independent Art Fair 2024, the gallery will showcase Stockman’s newest series of paintings, inspired by her recent invitation by the LA Philharmonic to experience the premier of the complete Etudes by Philip Glass. Throughout the three-hour piano performance, Stockman drew in the dark, transcendent heart of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, her lines and marks responding to the shifting tempo and temperature of each piece, while experiencing the music in rapt communion with the audience around her. Since then she has used those drawings to make a series of intimately-scaled 14 x 11 inch paintings, which follow each of Glass' Etudes. At the New York fair, ten of these jewel-like paintings will be accompanied by one of Stockman’s signature, large-scale 84 x 62 inch paintings; spanning an entire wall, Mountain of Sound (2024) marks a brilliantly-hued, all-encompassing crescendo of her painterly conversation with Glass.

Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence; works in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley). After concentrating on painting at Harvard, Stockman continued her studies in two important apprenticeships which shaped her lifelong pursuit of abstraction: Buddhist thangka painting at the Union of Mongolian Artists in Ulaanbaatar, and later, traditional Mughal miniature painting in Jaipur. From there she went on to earn her MFA at New York University. Recent 2023 exhibitions of the artist’s work include a two-person show at Gagosian Athens and a solo exhibition at Massimo De Carlo in London. Stockman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Palm Springs Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Farnsworth Art Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art, where she was recently included in the exhibitions California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold and 13 Women. Her solo exhibition Minotaur will open at the Foundation Le Corbusier in Paris this June.