April 1 - May 13, 2023
Reception: April 1, 2023 5-7pm
Artist Talk: April 15, 11am
DJ Hall is regarded as the quintessential Los Angeles photo-realist painter. While Richard Estes was painting reflections in New York windows, and Audrey Flack was focusing on luscious still lifes, DJ Hall was in the backyards and swimming pools of Southern California, framing the sunny life of what she called, “ladies who lunch.” Her paintings of women in big sunglasses, chatting poolside with drinks, cakes and magazines functioned as her own personal “illusion of reality” and formed the basis of her retrospective at the Palm Springs Art Museum in 2008. Recently, again as a byproduct of Covid, Hall was afforded a “time-out” for introspection and chose to explore new media and challenged herself in various directions all at once. These self-assigned projects included experiments in pixilation, an art historical re-imagining of Max Pechstein’s work, a narrative sequence of French travel, and a series of portraits of artists, curators and gallerists masked an unmasked. This multi-faceted assemblage of projects also included her lifetime practice of plein-air painting, usually in the form of small 6x4” landscape studies in gouache or watercolor. In conjunction with this exhibition, the artist and gallery have co-published a facsimile of one of her sketchbooks in a signed, limited edition.