Becky Kolsrud

Becky Kolsrud’s practice explores art-historical and vernacular depictions of the human form—namely women—throughout advertisements, signage, bather paintings, Japanese prints, surrealism, and abstraction. Her figurative paintings and wholly invented “inscapes” (interior landscapes that depict contained worlds of pink bodies against swaths of blue) are very much rooted in the real world, specifically her hometown, Los Angeles, and its complex relationship with nature. Kolsrud draws on motifs and imagery from the city’s history—and her own family’s place in that history—as well as religious and architectural iconography to explore the tension between artifice and reality; patterns planned and random; the observed and the observer; scale, place, and perspective; and how human desire fills in the gaps between what is seen and what is obscured. Her playful fascination with incomplete beauty (floating limbs, disembodied feet) falls in a continuum that starts with the degraded works of art handed down from ancient Greece, through the Catholic relics that imbue toes and wooden splinters with holy power, to the fragmented landscapes between concrete and mountain, palm tree and rubber, found today in Southern California.

Becky Kolsrud (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. The artist received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles (2012) and a BA from New York University (2006). Important solo exhibitions include Elegies, JTT, New York, NY (2021); As Above, So Below, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2020); and Yackety Yack Girls, Karma, New York, NY (2011). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK; Magenta Plains, New York, NY; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY. Kolsrud’s work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.