It's that time of the season where we look ahead and mark our calendars for the upcoming Fall shows. In September, LA's Luis De Jesus will host The Game of Patience, a solo show of new works by Laura Krifka. In preparation, we looked at some of her newer and past works to catch up to speed.

The Game of Patience features Laura Krifka's new figurative paintings that depict intimate moments between female and male subjects within carefully constructed interiors. Krifka deftly paints her bare-skinned protagonists reading, drawing, daydreaming, watching, and waiting. The peep of a phallus and the highlight of a thigh gap allude to the pleasure of stillness, supplemented by visual tension meticulously sculpted throughout the domestic spaces. A notable development in Krifka's content is the genesis of idiosyncratic wallpapers that appear to direct the viewer's gaze rather than lay flat. These imagined patterns create parallel planes of space, shift color and shape inexplicably, and build psychological tension, functioning like maps for the dream logic of each painting. 

At the heart of Krifka's practice are post-modern and contemporary critiques of canonical Painting. Krifka treats the false dichotomies of subject and object, male and female, observer and observed as comedic jumping-off points before bending or breaking the rules and moving onto nuanced and poetic concerns. Sensually charged pinks, purples, pea-greens, and ochers of afternoon reveries depict protagonists in vulnerable situations, while Krifka wanders through paintings with surprising detail and care, searching for consent and a deeper understanding of the nature of desire. 

The Game of Patience runs September 7th through October 26th, 2019. The gallery above shows both new and older works from the Ventura, California based artist.