Becky Kolsrud, Floating Skull, 2022; Original Painting

**These original works are available via private sale only. Please email hello@artforchange.com with your interest.

Becky Kolsrud’s figurative painting practice explores art-historical and vernacular depictions of the human form. Born and based in Los Angeles, the artist draws on her hometown’s history—and her own family’s place in that history—as well as religious and architectural iconography to explore the tension between artifice and reality; patterns planned and random; the observed and the observer; scale, place, and perspective; and how human desire fills in the gaps between what is seen and what is obscured. Kolsrud’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues that include Morán Morán, Los Angeles, CA; JTT, New York, NY; and Karma, New York, NY. Additionally, it is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and the Beth Rudin deWoody Collection, Miami, FL; among others.

Floating Skull (2022) and Untitled (Dryad) (2023) exemplify Kolsrud’s recurring focus on dismembered, female bodies, which extends a lineage that can be traced from the degraded sculptures of ancient Greece through to the relics of Catholic tradition. The former painting situates a nude torso, whose head has been replaced with a skull surrounded by a serpentine line, amid concentric, blue circles stacked atop one another as though to connotate a body of water. In the latter work, a pair of legs, wearing white stiletto shoes, replaces the trunk of a tree that stands alone against a vibrant sky. Kolsrud considers such compositions to be “inscapes,” a self-invented concept that refers to interior landscapes that depict contained worlds inhabited by pink, fleshy bodies often juxtaposed against swaths of blue.

Becky Kolsrud
Floating Skull, 2022
Oil on canvas
56 x 44 inches

With environmental conservation a central tenet of ART FOR CHANGE’s mission, the artists invited for this exhibition confront and contribute to the move toward sustainability by exploring nature and the environment through content, methods, inspiration, or process. In conjunction with the exhibition, ART FOR CHANGE and Phillips will plant 1,000 trees to help counter the CO2 emissions produced by the art industry.