Lynn Aldrich (born 1944) is an American sculptor whose diverse works draw on a wide range of high and low cultural influences and materials. Her work can range from what art writers describe as "slyly Minimalist meditations" on color, light and space to whimsical "Home Depot Pop" that reveals and critiques the excesses—visual, formal and material—of unbridled consumption. Critics Leah Ollman and Claudine Ise of the Los Angeles Times have described Aldrich's art, respectively, as a "consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition" and a "witty and inventive brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism" LA Weekly critic Doug Harvey calls her "one of the most under-recognized sculptors in L.A.," whose hallmarks are the poetic transformation of found/appropriated materials, formal inventiveness and restless eclecticism. Aldrich has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum, Santa Monica Museum of Art, and venues throughout the United States and Europe. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014) and public art collection acquisitions by LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles and the Portland Art Museum, among others.
Early life and career
Aldrich was born in Bryan, Texas into a military family that periodically moved throughout the United States. 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 thought and interests and later art practice. She initially studied biology at Stetson University, working as a virology lab assistant at Smith, Kline & French Laboratories (Philadelphia) during college summers. After shifting to English Literature, she graduated from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (BA, 1966), where she met future husband, Michael Aldrich. After deciding to move west, they settled in Glendale, California in 1970, where they raised three sons, Jack, Matthew, and Daniel.
Always interested in visual art, Aldrich took painting and drawing classes at Glendale Community College, before studying art at California State University, Northridge (BA, 1984) with painter Marvin Harden and at Art Center College of Design (MFA, 1986) with artists Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Stephen Prina. In graduate school she conceived a working strategy that 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. Aldrich exhibited widely in her first decade, gaining notice for solo shows at Krygier/Landau, Sue Spaid Fine Art, and Sandroni Rey (California), the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Cristinerose Gallery (New York) and Art Affairs Gallery (Amsterdam), as well as group shows at venues including MOCA Los Angeles, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, P.P.O.W. (New York), and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art.
In Aldrich's later career, Carl Berg Gallery, Ben Maltz Gallery, Edward Cella Art+Architecture, DENK Gallery (all Los Angeles) and Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York), among others, have held solo exhibitions of her work; her group exhibitions include shows at LACMA, MOCA Pacific Design Center, the Hammer Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, Paula Cooper Gallery and Museum of Biblical Art (both New York). Aldrich has also taught art at Azusa Pacific University (2011–5), Mars Hill Graduate School (2002–7), Art Center College of Design (1987–1998), UCLA, Otis College of Art and Design, and Biola University. She lives and works in the Los Angeles area.
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 Christian longing for revelation and transcendence. 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." Critics often note various, resulting dualities in her work: banality and profundity, humorous spectacle and near-apocalyptic concern, scientific empiricism and faith.
