Remedios Patton: Through The Looking Glass

Band of Vices is proud to present Through the Looking Glass, an exhibition of new works by Remedios Patton, an Afro-Latina painter based in Los Angeles. This show marks Patton’s fifth presentation and first solo exhibition with the gallery since her debut at age 17, and features a striking series of oil paintings on mirror that entwine rigorous technique with unflinching self-inquiry.

Rooted in a lifelong engagement with painting that began in high school and deepened through precollege studies at Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Patton recently graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University with a degree in Visual Arts. There, she refined a classically informed oil practice while widening her intellectual lens—bringing an analytical, research-driven perspective to figurative painting that both probes art history and reflects contemporary discourse.

In Through the Looking Glass, Patton turns to mirrors as both surface and subject. The reflective ground requires the artist—and the viewer—to confront the image and oneself simultaneously. Patton’s figures are rendered with the sensitivity and control of the Renaissance and Baroque masters who first inspired her, yet their presence resists the limits of historical narratives that excluded bodies like hers. By working on mirrors, she transforms the act of looking into an active dialogue about belonging, legacy, and perception—a conversation that implicates the viewer within the picture plane.

Patton’s trajectory has evolved from early “substitution” strategies—replacing canonical figures with Black and brown subjects—toward a more nuanced negotiation of identity and representation. Drawing on ancestral history and folklore alongside the Western canon, she uses the classical language of oil to cultivate human connection through gesture and micro-expression, while also interrogating how images accrue meaning across time.