Lara Schnitger: 10 Feet High and Rising

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce Lara Schnitger’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring larger-than-life dancing sculptures, heroically-posed fabric collages, and a series of portraits inspired by songs. In the new works, the artist draws from her personal biography, social history, current events, and pop culture to reflect on experiences of womanhood. As is characteristic throughout her thirty year practice, the Dutch-born LA-based artist uses over-the-top imagery and levity to counterbalance the seriousness of her concerns.

In 10 Feet High and Rising, Schnitger positions two dynamically-posed freestanding sculptures in the center of the third floor gallery. The wooden armatures covered in sheer stretched fabrics give form to bodies dancing in their underwear. This boisterous duo continues in the spirit of the artist’s monumental Warts and All sculpture installation recently presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Here in the gallery setting, however, the relationship between the figures and the surrounding space is tight, achieving both a new intimacy and intensity. At twelve feet tall, the dancers nearly burst through the ceiling. While fragile and delicately crafted, these towering women, entitled Leader of the Pack and Niagara, command attention and are forces to be reckoned with.

Highly-patterned fabric collages surround the sculptures and line the length of the space. In her large-scale collages, Schnitger explores new formal techniques such as merging foreground and background, and using foreshortening and a low angle perspective to emphasize scale. The active poses of the figures depicted in the compositions are inspired by those of superheros, manga characters, and sheela-na-gig, an ancient architectural symbol. Schnitger uses the semiotics of fashion and references to folk sayings to play with the portrayal of feminine power. One of the figures, entitled Cosmic Dancer in reference to the T. Rex song, is the artist’s vision of giving birth on the dance floor. (In the song, Marc Bolan sings “I danced myself right out of the womb.”) Schnitger dons this mother figure with a contorted facial expression, making a parallel between the ecstasy experienced in both dance and in childbirth.

The smaller-scale collages are the first of an ongoing series of individual portraits depicting women referenced in pop songs, ranging from Cat Stevens’ Sad Lisa to Alex G’s Mary. In creating each work, Schnitger used the song lyrics as a starting point for inspiration, and slowly the women began to take on their own lives, dictating what their portraits needed. Schnitger followed an intuitive process, parallel to the poetic rhyming involved in songwriting, to turn fantasies into unique embodiments. The artist sees the gesture of giving faces to the names as a way to give these characters their own agency, to let them shine as individuals with their own stories to tell.