LACEY STOFFER

Anna Erickson Presents Rave Paintings by Lacey Stoffer, a Los Angeles-based artist whose work incorporates painting, drawing, collage, and embroidery in a harmonious interplay of disparate yet unified elements. Inspired by the emotional energy and intrinsic logic of electronic music, Lacey’s process is both intuitive and methodical, beginning with a set of aesthetic parameters that she applies to each body of work. This approach ensures that an intentional cohesion resonates across each individual painting, revealing an underlying formalism that counterbalances her work’s emotive effect, a visceral experience bordering on the cathartic.

Lacey’s tools include raw linen, oil paint, charcoal, gouache, hand-dyed yarn, and paper clay pins. She builds each composition by layering organic shapes and diffuse color fields with carefully applied stitching and tiny pins affixed to each canvas like punctuation marks, as if narrating the history of their own making. The artist’s fascination with color theory also deeply informs her work, signified by her use of analogous tones that transcend subjective perception to invoke a palpable sense of tranquility and balance.

Through her use of subtle gradients, rich hues, and delicate textures, Lacey builds atmospheric constellations that echo forms found in nature, from the vast expanse of the cosmos to the infinitesimal cells of the molecular. Her distinct visual language, represented by immersive color fields and unexpected details, symbolizes a kind of existential duality, a synthesis of macro and micro, the metaphysical and the tactile, the external and the internal, and so on. Through her exploration of formalism and materiality, Lacey constructs her own abstract universe, an ecology of meaning that, similar to music, connects us to each other and to something greater than ourselves.

Lacey Stoffer was born in 1991, grew up in Portland, Oregon and now lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Stoffer has shown work in solo and group exhibitions at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, Otis College of Art and Design, Guest House Los Angeles and with Carl Larsson in Los Angeles.