Andie Dinkin: In the Spirit World
Charles Moffett is pleased to present In the Spirit World, Los Angeles-based artist Andie Dinkin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show gathers together Dinkin’s work across media, including the acrylic and gouache paintings on canvas and paper for which she is best known, largescale drawings, as well as a collection of painted ceramics; a first foray into medium for the artist, created in collaboration with her ceramicist sister. Drawing inspiration from a vast and deep well of influences, encompassing fairy tales, mythology, dream imagery, films, personal memories, and the work of artists spanning centuries, Dinkin creates theatrical compositions in vibrant color that blend the surreal and fantastical with the earthly and the human, rendered through notes of sorrow, joy, humor, and longing.
Eschewing preliminary sketches, Dinkin begins a new work directly on a clear gesso-primed canvas, allowing the gentle grooves of the surface to remain visible. With her blend of acrylic paint and water-based gouache, she creates ethereal color washes that comprise her paintings’ backgrounds. As the background takes shape, she starts to excavate her expansive bank of imagery — ranging from the work of Florine Stettheimer and Hieronymus Bosch to Leonara Carringon and William Blake to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Marc Chagall, to name but a few. Beyond her painterly predecessors, Dinkin draws upon popular fairy tales, Greek mythology, and films to inspire her imagery, and fuses those forms with her own treasured memories and close community of people, animals, and objects that shape her life. Mentally sifting through this wide reservoir, the artist sees what sparks her imagination, what motivates the movements of her brush, and intuitively develops each painting’s story.
Formally trained in illustration at Rhode Island School of Design, Dinkin has a deft command of the foundational principles of spatial painting. The internal bones of her paintings — carefully placed diagonal lines, balances of positive and negative space, perspectival clues — organically guide the viewers’ eyes across the canvas, revealing the painting’s narrative along this pathway. Dinkin is an artist who relishes the two-dimensional nature of painting. While her works communicate a depth of space, she never hides the flat nature of her medium. Her works have no borders; she allows forms to extend off the picture plane, a suggestion that their scenes could stretch on forever.
The artworks that comprise In the Spirit World emerged as therapeutic manifestations of the artist’s grief over the loss of her father who passed away in 2022. While a universal condition of life, death remains for many a taboo topic, obscured in fear and silence; yet, in the course of her grief, the artist has found profound relief and solace in the contemplation of death and the imagination of what realms may lie beyond the earthly. The impossibility of knowing that fate with any certainty does not render the exploration useless. Rather the imagining of where her father may be, who he may be with, or what he may be doing, generates a space for grief that evolves beyond the exclusively mournful, a grief that embraces conviviality, excess, adoration and ceremony. Dinkin’s artworks embody this act of grief as wonder, capturing the journeys one’s mind can travel in striving to visualize the unknowable.
Andie Dinkin (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA; BFA Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, 2014). Dinkin’s work has been presented in exhibitions around the country, including solo presentations with Half Gallery in New York (2024 and 2023) and Los Angeles (2023) and group shows with galleries including James Cohan Gallery in New York (2024), Harpers Gallery in East Hampton, NY (2024), One Trick Pony in Los Angeles (2024), and The Ranch in Montauk, NY (2023), among others. Prominent commissions of Dinkin’s paintings and works on paper include projects with Hotel El Roblar in Ojai, CA (2024), The Carlyle in New York, NY (2022), Fouquet’s in New York, NY (2022), and Evelina in Brooklyn, NY (2021). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.