Lily Stockman: Book of Hours
Charles Moffett is pleased to present Book of Hours, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Lily Stockman. This marks the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery and her first show in New York in three years. Following The Tilting Chair (2022), Stockman’s last exhibition at Charles Moffett, the artist’s work has been exhibited around the world, including her exhibition Minotaur (2024) at Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, and Nostos (2023) at Gagosian Athens, as well as acquired by institutions across the U.S., such as the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, among others.
Stockman draws inspiration from the devotional illustrated manuscripts known as books of hours, the first texts widely read across all classes and levels of literacy in medieval Europe. While no two were the same and varied vastly by region, they all contained a daily routine of prayers for the reader to follow, creating structure throughout the household day. Thousands of books of hours made between 1250 and 1700 survive today in libraries and museums, and it was a particularly striking one Stockman came across in the archive of the Morgan Library –a book of hours known as the Black Hours, painted in bright blues and greens, its pages dyed black with oak gall– which served as the genesis for this group of paintings.
Working across large and small scales, foggy atmospheres and crisp chromatic harmonies, her new body of work is both her freest and most engaged with the subject of time. “While making a slow-drying oil painting is a way of elasticating the present tense by slowing down time, my painting projects are always entangled with the past. Like any painter I love to plunder art history for its jewels, borrowing color from Fra Angelico (lapis blue, old rose, arsenic green), geometric form from Jantar Mantar, the early 18th century astrological observatories I used to explore while living in Jaipur as a young painter, or the relationship between thing and space, like that vibrating between-space in Morandi’s psychologically-charged tabletops. I’m interested in painting as a mode of time-keeping, and looking at art history as time-telling.”
Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence, RI) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (shaggy Los Angeles canyons, the vast Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) to establish her singular language of abstraction. 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. Stockman's work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Palm Springs Art Museum; Phoenix Art Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; and the Orange County Museum of Art. Recent institutional exhibitions of her work include the solo presentation Minotaur (2024) at Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris and the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold, which inaugurated the new home for the OCMA in Costa Mesa, CA.
