Jennifer Rochlin, Bella Foster and Viola Frey

May 22 - July 2, 2021

CHECKLIST AVAILABLE HERE

The Pit is pleased to present a three-person exhibition featuring Viola Frey, Bella Foster, and Jennifer Rochlin.  On view from May 22 – July 3 2021, with a socially-distanced public reception from 2-5pm on Saturday May 22nd, this exhibition features paintings and ceramic sculptures that continue the gallery’s tradition of promoting cross-generational conversations between historical and emerging artists.

Through widely variant deployments of materials, practice, and intention, these three artists have notable overlapping tendencies. Their still lifes depict liminal spaces, hovering between realism and surrealism; narrativity and non-narrativity; decorative and conceptual. All three artists’ subject matter tends to focus on relationships between women, plants, and animals, even though they paradoxically celebrate and elevate objects familiar to domestic scenes. All three embrace bold color, challenge perspective and dimensionality, and leave strong evidence of the artist’s hand in the finished works. They also challenge the erotics of the male gaze, as their observations and special attentions rove unpredictably towards atypically scintillating strange attractors. A “mask of tragedy” in Frey’s diorama, an owl scratched onto a Rochlin vessel, an alluring apple core in Foster’s painting — these artists expand definitions of beauty by lavishing the hidden with attention.

Frey and Foster’s two-dimensional artworks are highly sculptural while remaining at ease with their flat surfaces; Rochlin’s vessels evolved from desires to snap the flat surface into a third dimension. In this, their still lifes not only consider womens’ places in space, but refuse dimensional restriction as a feminist politic. Frey, as an artist who worked for over five decades and was recently deceased in 2004, brought colorful figuration honoring diversity of body type, skin color, and gesture into museums and public art spaces, where many emerging artists experienced her massive sculptural portraits of everyday people expressively dashed with color, often relaxing or otherwise enjoying their environments. Frey’s smaller works here exhibit the same dazzling energy: the tray dioramas in particular resemble film stills capturing dynamic motion, or weird cakes depicting dreams, baked to death while the artist hit the snooze button to dwell longer in her nocturnal fantasies.

All three artists bring fairy tale and fantasy elements into their unique renderings of reality. Rochlin’s works often feature heroic women, even superheroes, confident and boldly etched onto thick, giant pots adorned with squiggles, slashes, and botanical elements. Foster’s works riff on graphic design and children’s book illustration, and in this series forefront hilly landscapes and architecture that’s horizontally layered, striated, and stacked into fabulous dollhouse-like reconstructions that feel oddly documentary. Her washy watercolor and acrylic applications are brisk and spirited like Shibori-dyed textiles, welcoming chance and surprise through highly structural, patterned methods. Frey’s artworks hint at mythology through theatrical vignettes, symbolism, and figurative performance.

Every work in this exhibition is delicious, tantalizing, and voluptuous, and all three artists here are experts at setting serendipity up for success.

Inquiries please email info@the-pit.la