Linda Stark makes talismanic paintings in which psychic pop cultural symbols, personal mythologies and feminist notions of the body reverberate in polyphonic yet concise forms. Her practice of transfiguration is distinguished by a nearly spiritual dedication to process, as she meticulously builds canvases of layered oil that sometimes take up to five years to complete. Stark’s durational engagement with material invites committed and thoughtful spectatorship, making for a body of work that is undeniably auratic and emotionally dense.
Stark draws from her personal pictorial language, developed over decades, which combines concept and process. Transfiguring the canvas through the sculptural feature of a human nipple or manipulating paint to resemble the warp and weft of a textile, Stark’s textural explorations challenge perceptions of the feminine through their ambiguity. Rife with a sense of the ridiculous, her paintings reconfigure elemental forms, such as spirals, flames, and waves and sometimes depict Black Widows, hearts, cats and ovaries in an over-determination of gendered tropes. This virtuosic handling of paint accumulates into a transcendent iconicity saturated with sincere pleasure in the work’s material eroticism.
Linda Stark (San Diego, California) lives and works in Los Angeles. Stark has recently exhibited solo projects at David Kordansky, Los Angeles (2020); Jenny’s, Los Angeles (2017); and UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2013). Recent group exhibitions include New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2021–2022); Made in L.A. 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Painting: Now and Forever, Part III, Matthew Marks Gallery and Greene Naftali, New York (2018); and Forms of Identity: Women Artists in the 90s, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2017). Her work is in the public collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; and Berkeley Art Museum.
