Lynn Aldrich (born 1944) is an American sculptor whose art draws from both high and low cultural influences and materials.Jones, Amelia. "Lynn Aldrich," Artforum, Summer 1992, p. 115.Nolan, Timothy. "Lynn Aldrich," New Art Examiner, July–August 1997, p. 47.Frank, Peter. "Objects of Affection," LA Weekly, January 18–24, 2008.Ollman, Leah. "Lynn Aldrich transforms the physical in ‘Velvet Painting: Ascension’," Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2015. Retrieved January 13, 2020. Reviews have characterized her work variously as "slyly Minimalist meditations" on color, light and spaceIse, Claudine. "Shifting Perceptions," Los Angeles Times, " April 2, 1999. Retrieved January 10, 2020. and whimsical "Home Depot Pop" that reveals and critiques the visual, formal and material excesses of unbridled consumption.Kandel, Susan. "Intriguing Concepts, Los Angeles Times, May 2, 1997. Retrieved January 9, 2020.Valentine, Christina. "The uncommon life of objects and meaning," Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects, Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design/Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, 2013. Retrieved January 9, 2020. Leah Ollman and Claudine Ise of the Los Angeles Times term Aldrich's art, respectively, a "consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition"Ollman, Leah. "Aldrich is Such a Natural at Fakery," Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2008. Retrieved January 13, 2020. and a "witty brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism" LA Weekly's Doug Harvey calls her "one of the most under-recognized sculptors in L.A.," whose hallmarks are the poetic transformation of found materials, formal inventiveness and restless eclecticism.Harvey, Doug. "The Sculptures of Lynn Aldrich," LA Weekly, November 7–13, 2003, p. 35.
Aldrich has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum and Santa Monica Museum of Art.Otis College of Art and Design/Ben Maltz Gallery. 3 Solo Projects, Los Angeles: Otis College of Art and Design/Ben Maltz Gallery, 2009.Romano, Karen. "Lynn Aldrich," COLA 2000, Los Angeles: Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, 2000, p. 20–1.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Lynn Aldrich," Guggenheim Fellows. Retrieved January 9, 2020. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and her work belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, MOCA and the Portland Art Museum, among others.Calder, Diane. "Lynn Aldrich," ArtScene, November 2013, p. 12.The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. "Lynn Aldrich," Collection. Retrieved January 19, 2020.Los Angeles Museum County of Art. Breaker, Lynn Aldrich, Collections. Retrieved January 19, 2020.Hause, Melissa. "Enthralled with Being in the World," The Creative Spirit, Fall 2004, p. 26–31. She lives and works in the Los Angeles area.Hart, Hugh. "Artist Turns Garden Hoses, Toilet Plungers, Rain Spouts into 'Suburban Angst' Art", Co.Create, October 2013.
Early life and career Aldrich was born in Bryan, Texas into a military family that moved throughout the United States.Timberg, Scott. "Romantic and Realist: Lynn Aldrich," Art Center Dot Magazine, Fall 2019, p. 2–3. Her father was a veterinary pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and National Zoo (Washington, DC) and science was an influence on her early interests and subsequent art practice.Melrod, George, "Artist Profile: Lynn Aldrich," Art Ltd, November 6, 2015.Chattopadhyay, Collette. "Collecting Specimens: A Conversation with Lynn Aldrich," Sculpture, March 2010, p. 58–63. She initially studied biology at Stetson University, working as a virology lab assistant at Smith, Kline & French Laboratories (Philadelphia) during college summers.Greenstein, M.A. "The Meeting of Disciplines: Lynn Aldrich and Margaret Honda," World Sculpture News, Summer 1998, p. 33–7. After shifting to English literature, she graduated from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA, 1966), where she met future husband, Michael Aldrich.Timberg, Scott. "Concepts Are Not Enough: Aldrich Finds Beauty in the Physical Nature of Things," Art Center Dot Magazine, July 9, 2019. They settled in Glendale, California in 1970 and raised three sons, Jack, Matthew, and Daniel.
Aldrich explored a longstanding interest in art through painting and drawing classes at Glendale Community College, before studying art formally at California State University, Northridge (BA, 1984), with painter Marvin Harden, and at Art Center College of Design (MFA, 1986), with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Stephen Prina.Moreland, Patricia. "Making a Name for Themselves: 2-Location Exhibition Shows the Diversity of CSUN’s Art Graduates," Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1988. Retrieved January 9, 2020. In graduate school her working strategy emphasized materials, poetic allusions, three-dimensionality, shifts in scale, and reductive simplicity rather than a signature style; her influences included theorist Paul Virilio, artist/writer Robert Smithson, minimalists Donald Judd and Anne Truitt, and Californians Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha.Shorb, John. "An Interview with Lynn Aldrich." Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, V. 27, No. 1, p. 40–44.
After graduating, Aldrich exhibited widely, gaining notice for solo shows at Krygier/Landau, Sue Spaid Fine Art, Sandroni Rey and the Santa Monica Museum of Art in California, Cristinerose Gallery (New York) and Art Affairs Gallery (Amsterdam).Curtis, Cathy. "Santa Monica," Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1989. Retrieved January 9, 2020.Spaid, Susan. "Flora at Krygier Landau," Visions, Fall 1990.Pagel, David. "Flying Blind," Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1993. She appeared in group shows at MOCA, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, P.P.O.W. (New York), and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.Tanner, Marcia. "Five Artists in Search of an Exhibition," Artweek, November 3, 1994, p. 10.Levin, Kim, "The Short List: ‘Postmarked, L.A.’", The Village Voice, July 5, 1995, cover. In her later career, Carl Berg Gallery, Ben Maltz Gallery, Edward Cella Art+Architecture and DENK Gallery in Los Angeles and Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York) have held solo exhibitions of Aldrich's work.Ollman, Leah. "3 Solo Projects at Ben Maltz Gallery," Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2009. Retrieved January 13, 2020. She showed in group exhibitions at LACMA, MOCA Pacific Design Center, the Hammer Museum, San Jose Museum of Art and the Museum of Biblical Art in New York.
Aldrich has also taught art for roughly three decades, at Azusa Pacific University, Mars Hill Graduate School, Art Center College of Design, UCLA, Otis College of Art and Design, and Biola University.Biola University. "Lynn Aldrich," Visionaries. Retrieved January 9, 2020.
Work and reception Aldrich incorporates a wide range of reference points in her work: the excess and spectacle of consumer culture and life in Los Angeles, art and literary influences, natural and celestial phenomena, and the Christian longing for revelation and transcendence.Curtis, Cathy. "Lynn Aldrich’s Winging Streak: Artist Uses Audubon Drawings to Show Irony in Our Worship of the Wild," Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1991. Retrieved January 9, 2020.Johnson, Ken. "New Artists Motivated by Christianity," The New York Times, August 19, 2005, p. E33. Retrieved January 13, 2020.Fox, Howard N. Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects, Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design/Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, 2013. Retrieved January 9, 2020. Curator Stephen Nowlin wrote that Aldrich's "heterogeneous works fuse and defuse Duchamp, pop, and minimalist influences, at once both respectfully and irreverently, measuring the dimensions of contemporary existence by their use of a consumer's palette."Nowlin, Stephen. "Foreword," Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects, Pasadena, CA: Art Center College of Design/Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, 2013. Retrieved January 9, 2020. Critics often note resulting dualities in her work of banality and profundity, humorous spectacle and near-apocalyptic concern, scientific empiricism and faith.Chattopadhyay, Collette. "Lynn Aldrich at Gallery LASCA," Artweek July 1997, p. 25.
Writers also emphasize Aldrich's method of playing artistic influences such as the Light and Space movement off of feminist strategies that inject everyday and domestic elements into fine art.Linwood, Elliott. "Lynn Aldrich & Janet Biggs," Forms of Address, San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute, 1994, p. 11. She creates through processes of accumulation, repetition and placement that preserve the fundamental, recognizable nature of her source materials.Stringer, Catherine (ed). Contemporaries, Los Angeles: California Community Foundation, 2004, p. 62. The resulting works (and their punning titles) fuse, deconstruct or short-circuit form, function and meaning,Zellen, Jody. "Out of House and Home," dArt International, Summer 1999, p. 27. creating physical and conceptual conundrums that reveal inherent metaphors and poetic essences in common objects.Duncan, Michael. "Lynn Aldrich at Sandroni Rey," Art in America, January 2000, p. 127.
Early work (1987–1996) Early reviews describe Aldrich's work as "tartly conceptual,"Curtis, Cathy. "Artists’ Inventive Metaphors Save Poorly Focused Exhibit," Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1990. Retrieved January 9, 2020. "stunningly formalist arrangements" that transform mundane artifacts into inventive visual metaphors.Kandel, Susan. "Tricking the Eye," Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1994. Retrieved January 10, 2020. Meshing high-cultural minimalist form with the symbolism of mass-produced objects, works such as Subdivision (1990) or Shelf Life (1992) offered open-ended commentary on suburban domesticity, bourgeois humanism, and Modernist artistic practice.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Lynn Aldrich," ARTnews, May 1994, p. 166.Wilson, William. "'Means' Finds New Meanings in Old Schools of Thought," Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1996. Retrieved January 9, 2020. Subdivision featured sections of white picket fence arranged in a tight square formation that reviewers wrote signified both idealized suburban life and the claustrophobia or menace of pristine but squeezed living; Shelf Life featured stacks of food cans stripped of labels and wedged into a cupboard–like space, a meditation on obsolescence and mortality that Artforum likened visually to "a miniature Louise Nevelson in metal."
Critics often note a seamless merger of materials and concept in Aldrich's work.Knight, Christopher. "Reflections on Water," Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2003, p. E26. Retrieved January 10, 2020. David Pagel described Waxing and Waning (1990)—two dozen strips of wax paper hanging between plastic dispensers on adjoining walls—as a graceful, "ghostly send-up of Robert Morris’s seminal felt pieces" alluding to the invisibility and power of domestic labor.Pagel, David. "Ephemerality is Essential in 'Raw' Exhibit," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1991. Retrieved January 9, 2020. The nested, resin-starched t-shirts of Shell Collection (1993–4) referenced the life cycle and natural forms such as tree rings, organic sheddings, or chrysalises; ARTnews's Suzanne Muchnic described such works as "unusual think pieces" whose light touch, wry humor, and ephemerality made their "ideas all the more memorable because they seem weightless."
Mature work (1997– )