Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Laura Krifka: The Game of Patience, the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery, to be presented from September 7 through October 17, 2019. An artist's reception will be held on Saturday, September 7th, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

The Game of Patience features new figurative paintings by artist Laura Krifka that depict female and male subjects in intimate moments within carefully constructed interiors. Krifka deftly paints her bare-skinned protagonists reading, drawing, daydreaming, watching, and waiting. The peep of a phallus and the highlight of a thigh gap allude to the pleasure of stillness, supplemented by the visual tension meticulously sculpted throughout the domestic spaces. A notable development in Krifka's content is the genesis of idiosyncratic wallpapers that appear to direct the viewer's gaze rather than lay flat. These imagined patterns create parallel planes of space, shift color and shape inexplicably, and build psychological tension, functioning like maps for the dream logic of each painting.

At the heart of Krifka's practice are post-modern and contemporary critiques of canonical Painting. Krifka treats the false dichotomies of subject and object, male and female, observer and observed as comedic jumping off points before bending or breaking the rules and moving on to more nuanced and poetic concerns. Sensually charged in the pinks, purples, pea-greens, and ochers of afternoon reveries, all the protagonists are depicted in vulnerable situations, and Krifka wanders through paintings with surprising detail and care, in search of consent and a deeper understanding of the nature of desire.

Laura Krifka received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2010 and her BFA from California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo in 2008, following earlier studies at Newbold College in England and Avondale College in Australia. Krifka's work has been exhibited at the Torrance Museum of Art, L.A. Louver, CB1 Gallery, and Beacon Arts in Inglewood, as well as at Zroboli in Chicago, BravinLee Programs in New York, and Vast Space Projects in Las Vegas. Krifka's work has been featured in various publications including Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, Santa Barbara News-Press, New American Paintings, and Artillery Magazine and her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Westmont Museum of Art, and the Art, Design and Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara.