Lorin Labardee

About

“My work is impious, irreverent, dark and delicious. It’s grim out there; I make fun.” In one of Lorin Labardee’s earliest pieces, the artist transformed a found souvenir into a dark comment on tourism and Hollywood. It forged his entry into fine art when it was selected for the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Foot in the Door show in 1980. In 1982, Mr. Labardee studied photography at the University of Arizona. His first solo show, Inside the White Dove-Color and Wonder, documented the elaborate interior of Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona. After mentoring with a local painter, Mr. Labardee switched media. Mr. Labardee’s one-person painting show, Encyclopedia of Hats, featured 30 portraits on scavenged book covers. That show considered the malleability of identity. Mr. Labardee’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States. He has received grants from the Arts Foundation for Tucson and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Labardee's current paintings borrow from the work of Gerhardt Richter and Agnes Martin. The work features grids of layered paint co-mingling with mid-century modern iconography . The paintings highlight the postwar era’s unbridled hubris and rampant consumerism; codified delusions still dominant today.