Ochi is pleased to present Lily of the Valley, Lydia Maria Pfeffer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view in Los Angeles, California from March 19 through April 30, 2022.

Lydia Maria Pfeffer presents new paintings that depict a queer cast of characters as well as their seductive and strange worlds. Pfeffer’s artistic practice draws inspiration from mythology, shamanism, anthropomorphism, and playfully revels in art historical motifs and religious iconography. Set against earthly and other-worldly backdrops, the occult-like figures in this series dwell in both familiar and celestial landscapes. Pfeffer’s fantastical worlds are inhabited by bold figures who embody queer sensuality, femme kinship, and gender fluidity, through the expressive language of painterly symbolism.

Pfeffer’s phantasmic figures—part animal, part human—occupy ambiguous spaces somewhere between utopia and dystopia and even, perhaps, between heaven and hell. Many of the paintings include religious iconography which reference painting styles of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as Catholic and mythological symbolism. These religious icons float ethereally through erotic and hedonistic landscapes. In The Magic of Women (2021) a figure with a triangular halo, hands poised in near prayer peers at a couple, as they link arms and stare lovingly into each other’s eyes. In Happiness (2021), two figures embrace on a green couch in an eclectically decorated living room. Their fingers reach for each other—one pinching an erect nipple—and one piercing through a crucifix necklace. Both works speak to the very act of painting as a metaphor for divine union—the moment when flesh becomes paint—just as body becomes spirit.

The landscapes and backgrounds of these works are colorful, atmospheric, moody, and veiled. Pfeffer builds a unique world within each painting—some are populated by carnivalesque and chimera-like figures—others are more ghostly, alien, and even demonic. Yet, these worlds all operate under their own logic of ritual and self-discovery.

With a cheeky nod to the sexualized female figures of Austrian Expressionism, like those of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Pfeffer similarly charges her subjects with a raw femme sexuality that verges on the grotesque. However, unlike these historical representations of the sexed femme body— so often fraught with the confines of modernity and the male gaze—Pfeffer’s specters are fully selfrealized. They refuse the bounds of their own frames. Connecting familiarity with fantasy, and femininity with ferocity, Pfeffer’s works hover above the axis of desire itself. Lily of the Valley rejects painting’s inherited traditions of the patriarchal gaze and boldly asserts the power of a self-actualized queer eroticism.

(Anna Cahn)

Lydia Maria Pfeffer (b. 1976, Austria) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently works and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Pfeffer’s work mines a cross section of psychological strategies, cultural symbolism, rites, and rituals as she builds a world in which escapism is revelation and queerness is a healing journey. Anthropomorphism, gender play, eroticism, and style abound amidst a morphing cast of Pfeffer’s characters inspired by the fables, folk tales, and mythologies of her youth. Pfeffer’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Galerie Droste in Paris, France and Wuppertal, Germany; Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA; Club Pro, New Image Art Gallery, and OCHI in Los Angeles; and Center on Halstead, Chicago, IL.