Richard Jackson: The Little Girl’s Room
This is sick.
Meet Richard Jackson’s imagination and twisted fantasies. His first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in 20 years, the show is a significant milestone for an artist whose work has continually expanded and redefined the physical and conceptual reach of painting since the 1970s.
A painting in the largest possible sense of the word, and the latest in Jackson’s series of major room-based works, The Little Girl’s Room consists of an immersive environment designed to resemble the room of a child. Viewers will encounter a paint-covered installation that exceeds the constraints of purely visual experience; it is also the record of a performative action that unites careful engineering with unmediated experimentation and risk.
The sculptural figures that serve as both sources and supports for paint represent extremes of physicality in which the infantile and the archaic resemble each other. A larger-than-life Jack-in-the-box will be draped over one of the gallery’s trusses, and when activated will emit paint downward from the pointy tip of its hat; a hobby horse, its head lodged in a bucket of paint, will rock back and forth, dumping the bucket’s contents onto the floor around it; a sculpture of a baby will sit with a collection of baby bottles, filled and overfilled with paint; and, half-hidden in a closet, a comically aroused clown will communicate an aura of unsuccessfully repressed sexuality.
images courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery
