Work by Lily van der Stokker on view at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Sat, Feb 7 - Sun, May 17  2015

On view February 7 until May 17 at the Hammer Museum, colorful large-scale wall by Dutch artist Lily van der Stokker

About the exhibition

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.

About Lily van der Stokker

Lily van der Stokker (b. 1954, Den Bosch, the Netherlands) lives and works between Amsterdam and New York City. Van der Stokker 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’s recent solo exhibitions include: Koenig & Clinton, New York (2014); New Museum, New York (2013); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2012); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005-07); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2003).

Her work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions at international venues, such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (2011); South London Gallery (2010); Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (2009), and De Appel, Amsterdam (2008), among numerous others. Amongst solo and group exhibitions, 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 top of a high-rise in a shopping center in Utrecht, Holland in 2013.

Hammer Projects is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Hope Warschaw and John Law, and Maurice Marciano. Additional support is provided by Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, the Decade Fund, and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel Fund. The Hammer Museum’s Public Engagement program is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.
Hammer Projects: Lily van der Stokker is generously supported by the Mondriaan Fond