Lari Pittman @ Lehmann Maupin Seoul - 'Caprichos and Nocturnes' Exhibition

Lari Pittman

Caprichos and Nocturnes

Lehmann Maupin Seoul

November 6 – December 27, 2025

Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Los Angeles–based artist Lari Pittman’s solo exhibition Caprichos and Nocturnes on the heels of his recent museum surveys Mirror & Metaphor at the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, South Korea, and Magic Realism at the Long Museum in Shanghai, China, both curated by Rochelle Steiner. While these retrospectives traced the past decade of Pittman’s career, this presentation focuses on his Nocturne and Capricho series. Created in 2015, both series share a visual language of symbolic text and art historical references as Lari Pittman interweaves literature, history, craft, and decorative arts into intricate compositions. 

Lari Pittman is known for his densely layered painting style, marked by a personal lexicon of signs and symbols such as bells, eggs, and ropes. Often working on a large scale, Pittman has an innate ability to compose works in which every element holds equal space and significance. In his Capricho series, he depicts violence and decay alongside utopian fantasy, drawing on references to Francisco Goya (1764–1828; Spain) and Emily Dickinson (1830–1886; United States of America). The Nocturne series, by contrast, envisions a suite of musical nocturnes translated into paintings. Together, this particular body of work creates an interwoven narrative that reveals the artist’s exploration of beauty, violence, and the complex interplay between fantasy and reality.

The Nocturne series unfolds as a visual analogue to the musical form, offering romantic, dreamlike reflections on the mysteries of night. Against dark, star-strewn grounds, Lari Pittman layers recurring motifs of eggs and hybrid robotic creatures, conjuring scenes that feel at once ancient and futuristic. His restrained palette of mauves, earthy yellows, greens, and browns imbues the works with a quiet intensity, while the recurring egg motif suggests regeneration. Departing from his long-standing engagement with horror vacui, these works introduce a sense of visual openness, allowing the compositions to breathe. In Nocturne #9 (2015), a white, intricately patterned figure floats upside down against a black ground with glowing orbs and misty, galaxy-like forms. Fine lines and geometric markings give the figure a human-mechanical quality, while web-like threads and bright halos suggest drifting weightlessness and tranquil mystery, exploring night as a threshold between clarity and obscurity and balancing apparent chaos with meticulous structural order to suggest a cosmos where past and future share equal footing.

By contrast, the Capricho series adopts a more somber register, juxtaposing violence and decay with utopian fantasy to investigate trauma and power as culturally and historically transmitted structures. Here, Lari Pittman pays homage to Los Caprichos, the late-18th-century etchings by Francisco Goya that exposed the brutality of human behavior and the oppressive social conditions of his time. He also embeds the works with excerpts from Emily Dickinson’s poetry—specifically regarding the body, pain, and death. Pittman’s visual juxtaposition of the Spanish painter with the American poet, whose sensibility was marked by the austerity of Puritan New England, can be read as a reflection of his own complex cultural formation as the child of a Catholic Colombian mother and an Atheist American father. In Capricho #8 (2015), jagged lightning forms, fragmented figures, and night-sky specks collide with oversized domino tiles, while angular, mask-like faces and contorted bodies emerge in bursts of electric blue, yellow, and earthy green. Hand-painted lines from Dickinson’s poem on the atrocities of the Civil War, “They Dropped Like Flakes” (1862), trace the borders of the composition, infusing the work with poetic resonance and apocalyptic intensity.

Through these two series, Lari Pittman combines symbolism, literary references, and art historical sources into compositions that balance structure and emotion. By translating the nocturne into a meditation on night and regeneration, and by revisiting Goya’s Caprichos through Dickinson’s reflections on mortality, Pittman situates painting as a space where history, imagination, and the present intersect. 

Previous exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul:

Teresita Fernández: Liquid Horizon

Through October 25, 2025

Previous exhibition of LARI PITTMAN at Lehmann Maupin Seoul:

Lari Pittman, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous

March 15 – May 7, 2022

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Lari Pittman @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - Opaque, Translucent and Luminous

Lari Pittman

Opaque, Translucent and Luminous

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

March 15 – May 7, 2022

Lehmann Maupin announces the opening of its new and expanded gallery space in Hannam-dong, Seoul and its inaugural exhibition, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous, a presentation of new work by Los Angeles-based artist LARI PITTMAN. 

The artist's first exhibition in South Korea, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous inaugurates the opening of Lehmann Maupin’s new home in Seoul, a 2,600 square-foot venue that dramatically expands the gallery’s previous imprint in the city. Designed by the award-winning firm Society of Architecture (SoA), the space occupies two stories in the Hannam-dong neighborhood and also boasts an outdoor terrace to exhibit sculpture. Spanning both floors of the gallery, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous offers an homage to big cities, reaffirming their vitality, dynamism, and importance in the face of the destabilizing effects of the global pandemic on urban life.

Lari Pittman’s decades-long practice reflects his enduring fascination with human nature, the construction of political histories and mythologies, and sociocultural relationships. His unique visual aesthetic—with skillful layering of signs and symbols, varied painting techniques, and rich, intricate patterns—has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. 

For his first exhibition in South Korea, Lari Pittman turns his gaze outward from examining primarily Western histories and cultural pathologies towards a wider evaluation of our common global psyche. With consideration to the collective effects of the last two years, Pittman’s newest body of work aligns itself with the visionary, positive, and ebullient, using art to envision a viable alternative to our current state of affairs and another, brighter version of the present or future. Organized in three titular cycles meant to be experienced in sequential order, the work in Opaque, Translucent and Luminous argues that the essential theater of humanity continues to play out in the world’s largest metropolises, affirming the centrality of the urban over the rural despite the many recent setbacks to city living. Fittingly, many of the works in this series are crowded with construction—buildings sit on top of buildings, bridges stretch between competing skyscrapers, and architectural styles span from the medieval to the Victorian, industrial to postmodern. Other works depict creatures of the city, with birds resembling pigeons, swallows, or starlings, and insect-like beings with delicate legs and pincers sprawling across the canvas. 

Eggs, a recurring symbol throughout Lari Pittman’s oeuvre, are present in many works in Opaque, Translucent and Luminous. In some paintings they seem to represent pure possibility, filled with potential that could emerge at any moment. In others, they masquerade as light sources, their shape and placement recalling street lamps, or they appear elevated, standing in for public monuments. In one work, three eggs are positioned diagonally across the canvas, serving as focal points that provide a way in for the viewer. The central egg appears monument-like, its shape and placement echoed in the framing devices surrounding it, while the lower egg appears to be mounted on a lamppost, encircled with a leafy pattern that could be imagined in wrought iron. The blue tones of the painting suggest large bodies of water, locating the scene in a coastal city, while the towering bridge suggests the verticality of capitals like New York, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. In his envisioning of alternative presents or futures, Lari Pittman’s eggs gender our renewed cities as female, contrasting the traditional conception of metropolises as innately masculine or the predominance of statues exalting male figures in our civic spaces.

Timelines and narratives are layered throughout the paintings in Opaque, Translucent and Luminous. In his signature style, Lari Pittman presents multiple perspectives and picture planes within a single composition, mirroring the way a city can contain a multitude of divergent and overlapping stories, all occurring simultaneously. Filled with orbs, apertures, and eyes, the works seem to watch all that is unfolding within their frame. Rigorous in its approach and ambitious in its breadth, Opaque, Translucent and Luminous presents a vision of the future, fully enmeshed in, and built out of, the remains of the past. 

A select work from Opaque, Translucent and Luminous will also be on view during Frieze Los Angeles (February 17–20, 2022), and a monumental, six-part painting, Crystalloluminescence (2022), will be presented at Art Basel Hong Kong (March 22–26, 2022). 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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