Hammer Museum

Hammer Projects: Lily van der Stokker

07 Feb - 03 Jun 2015

HAMMER PROJECTS: LILY VAN DER STOKKER
7 February - 3 June 2015

Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker has been making bold, colorful large-scale wall paintings for more than twenty years. The artist applies colors ranging from soft pastels to bright fluorescents—sometimes in playful and visually arresting plaid patterns or all-over flower motifs—to amorphous soft-edged forms that inhabit the space like friendly oversized visitors. Witty texts added alongside van der Stokker’s forms complicate their first impression as the cartoony doodles of an adolescent or mere decorative ornamentation. Invoking the platitudes of polite society with expressions like “Best regards” or “Wonderful” or touching upon the realities that impact all our lives, from love to money to aging, with phrases like “Transfer the money to me” or “Only yelling older women in here, nothing to sell,” van der Stokker makes evident the power dynamics at work within seemingly innocuous spaces. Van der Stokker argues for the role of pleasure in aesthetic experience, finding alliances between beauty and intellect, playfulness and criticality.

Hammer Projects: Lily van der Stokker is organized by senior curator, Anne Ellegood with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant.

Lily van der Stokker (b. 1954, Den Bosch, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City. She earned a degree in drawing and textiles from R.K. Scholengemeenschap St. Dionysus, Tilburg, and a second degree in monumental design and painting from the Academy of Art and Design St. Joost, Breda. A practicing artist for several decades, Van der Stokker has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Air de Paris, Paris (2014, 2005, 2000); Koenig & Clinton, New York (2014); New Museum, New York (2013); kaufmann repetto, Milan (2012, 2010, 2005, 2002); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2012); Leo Koenig, New York (2010); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2005–7); and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2003). Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions at international venues, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Netherlands (2011); South London Gallery (2010); Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France (2009), and De Appel, Amsterdam (2008). Van der Stokker has undertaken two large-scale public commissions. In 2000 she created The Pink Building, for which she painted the entire exterior and roof of a building for the World’s Fair in Hannover, Germany, and she designed a large ceramic teapot, Celestial Teapot, for the roof of a high-rise shopping center in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2013.
 

Tags: Lily van der Stokker