Angeline Rivas

Angelina Rivas (b. 1981, Kansas City, MO) lives and works in Los Angeles.

Painted with airbrush on wood panel and canvas, the works of Angeline Rivas are vast, yet compact crucibles of a unique form of western Americana. To wit: the transcendentalist imagery of Agnes Pelton, cults, Light and Space and Finish Fetish, extraterrestrial life, the work of Carl Sagan, inter-dimensionality, Star Trek, the Pynchonian tendency toward paranoid, but ultimately plausible conspiracy theories (MKUltra), the flamboyance of Judy Chicago, spiritualism, crystals, et alia. When all is said and done, these paintings can be read as oblique allegories of California in its historical capacity to engender and hold extreme experimental modes of both living and thinking at once. On the one hand, you have The Esalen Institute and on the other, Heaven’s Gate. It is precisely this space of paradox, where the utopian meets the dystopian, which fascinates and motivates Rivas in her formal and ethnographic investigations.

The paintings themselves formally reflect this contradictory radicality through an almost hypnotic magnetism which also repels through their bracing excess of detail (think Bridget Riley on some particularly potent LSD) and fluorescent palette. By no means just pretty images, they seek to challenge not only the viewer, but also painting itself through their unique use of airbrush technique. Unlike typical airbrush painting, Rivas' works have a way of disclosing, as opposed to effacing, facture via imperfections, pieces of tape, and small moments of graffiti, making it such that the work has carved out a singular space for itself both on a formal and a conceptual level.

Recent solo exhibition includes MKUltramarine, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023.

Recent group exhibitions include Angeline Rivas and Chelsea Culprit, OSMOS, Stamford, 2024; and TLC PLZ, Crickets Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021.