Minotaur - Lily Stockman à la Maison La Roche
Lily Stockman
MASSIMODECARLO and Fondation Le Corbusier are delighted to present Minotaur at Maison La Roche in Paris.
‘Le Corbusier taught me how to bring the outside inside’
Within the curved concrete walls and massive glass windows of Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, Lily Stockman studied painting as a young student at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for Visual Arts. She now returns to the architect in a presentation of eleven new paintings made specifically for Maison La Roche, the iconic house he built in Paris in 1923 - 1925, adjacent to Maison Jeanneret, home to Fondation Le Corbusier.
Stockman chose the exhibition title, Minotaur, as an homage to Le Corbusier’s interest in Greek mythology and his collages featuring the figure of a bull. In Stockman’s installation, she imagines herself as the Minotaur, who in the Greek story resides within a unicursal labyrinth, which despite having multiple false paths has only one single, true way to the centre. Maison La Roche was built to showcase the principles of the French school of purisme, so that the rooms, ramp, openings, and windows are intended to be experienced from a single, fixed point.
Singular to Maison La Roche more than any other Le Corbusier project is its experimental polychromatism–– cerulean blue, apricot, reflective black, brilliant orange– and framing devices, which Stockman mimics and investigates to the effect of collaboration between the French architect and herself, an American painter.
The first exhibition by an American woman artist to be shown at Maison La Roche, Minotaur is punctuated with references that celebrate the rich historical channel of cultural communication between French and American artists and writers, from a homage to the poet and Cubist champion Apollinaire to the shared landscape of Joan Mitchell and Claude Monet in Clouds over Vétheuil. Minotaur marks Stockman’s first solo presentation in Paris.
The Artist
Lily Stockman was born in Providence, RI, in 1982. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Yucca Valley, CA.
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 colours– crackling orange, red earth, Holbein brown, and Fra Angelico blue. In a review of Stockman’s most recent exhibition, 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 the prosaic — seed catalogues, topographic maps, birdsong, skating on a frozen pond –– to the archaic — Shaker gift drawings, mediaeval hocketing, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry metre.
After concentrating on painting at Harvard, where she also studied art history under Yve-Alain Bois, Stockman continued her studies in two important apprenticeships which shaped her lifelong pursuit of abstraction: Buddhist thangka painting at the Union of Mongolian Artists in Ulaanbaatar, and later, traditional Mughal miniature painting in Jaipur. From there she went on to pursue her MFA at New York University.
Stockman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, LA MOCA, Palm Springs Art Museum, Phoenix Art Museum, and Orange County Museum of Art, where she was recently included in the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold.