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Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence, RI) is a Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, California-based painter. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (Los Angeles, the Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) for her distinctive palette of glowing, tertiary colors– crackling orange, red earth, Holbein brown, and Fra Angelico blue. The New Yorker art critic Johanna Fateman describes the artist’s biomorphic compositions as “both diagrammatic and vaporous, a combination that calls to mind the spiritualist abstractions of the American modernist Agnes Pelton. Although they’re more lyrical, Stockman’s nested shapes also have the meticulous magic of Josef Albers’s squares.” 

Stockman’s paintings emerge from a wide range of references, from natural phenomena— vernal pools, mineral licks, birdsong, black ice — to historical devotional endeavors— Shaker gift drawings, medieval hocketing, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry meter. Her most recent project explored Emily Wilson’s English translation of Homer’s Odyssey, at Gagosian Athens.

Stockman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Palm Springs Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Farnsworth Art Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art, where she was included in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.