Ochi and Dinner Gallery are pleased to present a loving kind of dream, an exhibition of new work by artist Lydia Maria Pfeffer. This is Pfeffer’s third solo exhibition with the Los Angeles-based OCHI and her first with Dinner Gallery. A loving kind of dream will be on view at Dinner Gallery, located at 242 West 22nd Street in New York, NY from November 21, 2024 through January 18, 2025.

Lydia Maria Pfeffer presents a dazzling suite of new paintings that offer escapist fantasies set in a world where tranquility, restoration, spiritual nourishment, and bliss can be achieved through rest. The artist offers a panacea for our troubled world, with each joyful canvas projecting the artist’s deep desire to offer her audience th e things they need most: rest and relaxation. As Pfeffer opines, in an era of constant anxiety, it “is a luxury when you don’t have to sleep with one eye open”. With their eyes intentionally painted closed, Pfeffer’s figures can sleep, dream, imagine, and most importantly they can refuse to meet our gazes or our needs: “no matter what you do, you cannot make them open their eyes. You cannot disrupt this peace. You’d have to burn down the painting to disrupt their peace, but even then, you couldn’t because they’ve already been painted. Their story’s already been told”.

It is no surprise that green is Pfeffer’s favorite color: it pulsates with life in the foliage that abounds in her work. As the artist says, “when we connect to plants, animals, and other beings that are not necessarily human, it recalibrates us and nourishes us”. Entering the realm of her canvases, the viewer loses the weight of the world, carried along on a bed of emerald hues. The artist’s colorful compositions brim with a vibrant life force. Here, in this enchanted world angels, mermaids, and fantastical beasts frolic together with a sense of ease. In their vivid spontaneity, they conceal their carefully constructed compositions, Pfeffer’s monumental canvas Arachne's Awakening (2024), the centerpiece of the exhibition, successfully balances more than a half-dozen figures with balletic grace. Surrounded by a “supporting cast”, Pfeffer’s protagonists are depicted at rest—having removed their armor after long and productive days at work, they lounge peacefully surrounded by fantastical and often hybrid beings who provide care and protection. Pfeffer knows that everyone needs rest to regain their strength and be their most spectacular self. Amongst the lush of her scenes hide many small, unexpected surprises like forest frogs and fairies peppered throughout to delight her viewers.

Pfeffer’s paintings are of the moment, soothing balm on our current societal concerns, but the artist tips her hat to several artistic forebearers. The black snake and lemon tree in Arachne's Awakening are nods to Henri Rousseau, the French post–Impressionist artist who famously painted fantastical jungles filled with tigers and monkeys, while never leaving the confines of Paris. As Pfeffer says of Rousseau, “there must be something inside this man’s psyche and soul that needed to make these paintings, that wanted to be there…” With a similar spirit, Pfeffer remarks on her own work, “these paintings are a longing, they are a desire…the spaces I create, I want to be in them”.

Born and raised in rural Austria, Pfeffer is the daughter of a gamekeeper and the granddaughter of a self-taught taxidermist and illustrator who worked as a lumberjack and on farms—and grew up vividly aware of the power of animals and the elegance and variation of their forms. Reimagining myth and legend, Pfeffer’s work continues to find inspiration in Grimm’s fairy tales and the stories of the forest. She was fascinated by the tales of talking animal tricksters, like frisky Ren the fox, who she describes as one of her first loves, though each for the animals that appears in Pfeffer’s canvases is symbolic: the jaguar expresses independence, the fox is a busy shapeshifter running between worlds, the monkey is a joyful and playful being.

These animals also represent archetypes of desires and fears that play themselves out across cultures; they may look different from place to place, but the underlying moral is the same everywhere, when our fears and desires bid us to come hither in a series of repeating imagery. Pfeffer’s animals also suggest a relationship to the pagan world and much of her work is a conscious decision to create work that celebrates autonomy, joy, female sensuality, and the sources of pleasure historically condemned by the Catholic Church. Pfeffer cites fellow Austrian artist Herman Nitsch as a key influence, noting that, for her, Nitsch “embodies the struggle of a Catholic trying to rid themselves of shackles of morality whilst also being enthralled and indoctrinated”.

Pfeffer’s fervid imagination is key to the creation of her strange creatures—mixes of fantasy and reality that populate her paintings. Beyond Rosseau, Pfeffer draws from a panoply of sources, citing inspiration from artists as diverse as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Louise Bourgeois, and Kiki Smith. All these artists share Pfeffer’s propensity to incorporate dreamlike and Surrealist elements in their work, and, for Pfeffer, this kind of magical realism becomes its own support system: it serves as counterweight to the legacy of the oppressive Catholicism that suffused her childhood.

The monumental femme and gender fluid figures that rest in each painting act as mythologized stand-ins for the artist, functioning as myriad versions of herself, grotesques, and other variations of her persona that define a powerful and self-assured femininity. These ideas of fluidity seem to take physical shape in the hybrid creatures and fantastical characters that appear and reappear in her paintings, such as the mermaid, griffin, and unicorn. Using her fantasies, Pfeffer transforms and transcends the restrictive edicts and constraints of an intensely capitalist urban city and its art market, creating a vision of beautiful and restful sanctuary lushly and brilliantly brought to life by her brush.

(Text by Bartholomew F. Bland)

Lydia Maria Pfeffer (b. 1976, Austria) received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pfeffer’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Galerie Droste in Paris, France and Wuppertal, Germany; Gallery X Chiao in Taipei, Taiwan; Dinner Gallery in New York, NY; Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale, CA; Club Pro, New Image Art Gallery, and Ochi in Los Angeles, CA; and Center on Halsted, Chicago, IL. Pfeffer’s work has been featured in publications including AUTRE, Hyperallergic, Harper’s Bazaar France, KCRW, Los Angeles Times, Flaunt Magazine, Paper City Magazine, Amadeus, Full Blede, and Fabrik. Pfeffer currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is represented by Ochi.