Larissa Lockshin creates gestural, scintillating abstractions in vibrant, coruscating hues. Using oil and soft pastels without the assistance of brushes or utensils, she marks amorphous forms and verdant blots on pearlescent, unprimed satin. Her works evoke lush foliage, winding roads, and rapturous landscapes speckled with flora but lean into abstraction as an exploration of texture, form, and materiality. Each element of her interdisciplinary approach reveals her hand: the milky, vivid pastels, the subtle hues of hand-dyed satin, and the faux-naïf frames she meticulously carves and adorns with sculptural elements. Subsequently, Lockshin’s creations blithely inhabit a space between painting and sculpture.
The sculptural quality of Lockshin’s work is heightened by the contrast and tension between the glistening fabric that serves as her base and her matte, saturated pastels and hand-carved wooden elements. Areas of the satin left bare by pigment become breaks of light on the surface of the works, reminiscent of the sun peeking through clouds after a storm or the glittering surface of the ocean at dusk. This interplay of material and textural tension produces compelling sculptural objects that shift and shimmer as the day unfolds and as viewers move around them.
Lockshin’s paintings are powerful in their immediacy, suggesting glimpses of passing weather systems, ethereal landscapes, and dream-like visions. Citing inspiration from Milton Avery, The Group of Seven, and Tom Thomson, she deftly navigates the line between abstraction and realism. Working with a range of motifs and symbols that spark recognition, Lockshin embraces elemental themes and landscapes as universal languages. Yet her emphasis remains on objecthood, over image content, where one mark guides the next in an organic, intuitive process. “It is a bit like weather,” she muses. Her practice is informed by frequent visits to museums across New York City and beyond, where she studies the warm palettes of the French Impressionists, translating and electrifying their influence in her work. While she has long used satin as her base, she recently began hand-dyeing it with custom-mixed colors. This technique mimics the appearance of underpainting, infusing the works with a subtle luminosity. These new works evoke the mood of a specific time of day or season, deepening their atmospheric qualities.
Each of Lockshin’s works is named after historical racehorses, drawn from the peculiar and often poetic pairings of names that no two horses may share. She delights in the unexpected poetry of these names and compares it to the distinct imprints and gestures in her work. “With the paintings, too, it’s the same apparatus, the same material, the same motifs, but no two are ever alike,” she explains.
Born in 1992 in Toronto, Canada, Lockshin earned her BFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design. Her recent solo and duo exhibitions include Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona, Spain (2024); Europa, New York, NY (2023); Cob Gallery, London, UK (2023); and Pipeline Contemporary, London, UK (2023). She has also participated in group exhibitions at James Cohan Gallery, New York City (2024); 12.26 Gallery, Dallas and Los Angeles, USA (2024); Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona, Spain (2023); and Baronian Xippas, Brussels (2021). Lockshin lives and works in New York City.