LANI IRWIN

LANI IRWIN is an American figurative painter, who has lived and worked in Italy since 1987.

She constructs sculptural assemblages, collage, textile works, but she predominantly paints. Born in 1947, her childhood was coloured by her living in Hong Kong and in Europe. Living in Italy in her late teens, she acquired an early and deep appreciation for Italian Medieval and Renaissance art. She has shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, and the U.K., from 1974 to the present. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Katzen Art Center, in DC, the Fralin Museum of Art, in VA, the Huntington Museum of Art, WV, and the Museo Internazionale della Donna nell’Arte in Scontrone, Italy.

“All representational painters play with the paradox of perception. We acknowledge the fact when we refer to an apparently three-dimensional object in a painting as both ‘realistic’ and ‘illusionistic’. Our double awareness is part of our enjoyment, a recognition of the artist-magician’s skill. Lani Irwin takes this legerdemain a step further by juxtaposing human figures and their simulacra, by exploring the liminal space between object and figure, between figure and ground. On the threshold between reality and illusion, Irwin’s paintings are simultaneously reticent and dramatic.”