Kate Pincus-Whitney: To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Kate Pincus-Whitney To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from June 29 through August 17. This is Pincus-Whitney’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and with the gallery and debuts new tablescape paintings, including some of her largest to date. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 29 from 5-8 pm.

Synthesizing contemporary life and mythology, Pincus-Whitney’s paintings map culture, place, and self through the foods and objects we consume. She packs her maximalist paintings with platters of food from iconic Los Angeles restaurants and eateries, glittering glassware, menus, local flora, sentimental objects, and so many books. Titles range from Jonathan Gold’s Counter Intelligence to Visions of the Occult: An Untold Story of Art & Magic by Victoria Jenkins, to a catalogue of Richard Diebenkorn’s  Ocean Park paintings.

Pincus-Whitney is both dyslexic and stereo blind (which affects her depth perception), the inclusion of these texts, brand labels, and icons address legibility. Both through a literal sense—encouraging viewers to tease out their own connections, but also through an examination of how one ‘reads’ pictures. Perspectival shifts, jumps between places, cuisines, and through time (RIP Perino’s), channel the subconscious and symbolic relationships to her vast and researched references, wherein everything is mined. Here, the sacred and profane come together around the same table.

A discreet and ongoing sub-series of works, dubbed the ‘door paintings,’ adhere to the dimensions of a single door turned horizontally. They are invitations to enter and join the banquet feast set out for viewers, deities, heroines. This reorientation gestures away from so-called objective reality, leading viewers to the uncharted wilderness of psychic reality. However fractured and hallucinatory, To Live and To Dine in LA/ You Taste Like Home, ensconces us in vibrant microcosms of Pincus-Whitney’s personal sense memory and regional history, where certain restaurants and neighborhoods become characters themselves: To live, to dine, to toast, to celebrate the power of communing with one another.

At times Pincus-Whitney’s compositions act as shrines, others a stage, or narrative portraits that reveal truths about life and death, the existential and alchemical. Deeply invested in early movements of Modernism, she mines the ritual of “the meal” to tap into our collective unconscious. Taking on the tradition of cubist “still life” in the lineage of Braque and Léger,  Pincus-Whitney’s frenetic and improvisational approach is energetic, bursting, full of movement. Overflowing, these consuming constructions are the anti-still life, thrusting forward, hinging on a network of delicious abundance, nourishing the belly and the brain.