L.A. Louver is pleased to present expanded multimedia content for Rebecca Campbell: Young Americans.
Discover the inspiration and processes behind this body of work through an essay by the artist and four focused sections illuminated by video descriptions, studio images, and more.
Images of Rebecca Campbell studio event featuring sitters from the Young American series and the artist.
Photography by Allan Stoops.
Young Americans
Essay by Rebecca Campbell, May 2024
They are pictures of my kids, but I’m looking at myself. I’m watching myself listen to David Bowie, twelve years old, boys asking to do things, not ready, wanting to hear boys ask… a curious child.
I’m watching myself surf Reaganomics in elbow length leather gloves and a silk smoking jacket, on a Tuesday in Home Economic class at Brighton High, where we are learning to make a perfect hot cake, while America wages the perfect cold war.
I’m watching my locker fill up with pictures of Prince, the spectacle and the story of him, slipping through genders like a buttered bullet, Calvin Klein underwear ads, Albert Einstein, and Gene Wilder.
I’m watching myself drowned in an American religion, baptized one week after I wrecked my bike so bad I needed 12 stiches, baptized by a man who told me that if my mind was impure “Satan could enter the house and do anything he wanted” to me. A man who watched me, watching him, born painter.
I’m watching myself after Claudia’s funeral, lead a pack of wild cousins in nylons, in a fiery shoeless shuffle around the kiva, touching the screw in every socket as we pass to decorate our fingers with fireworks.
The paint also traces my kids. The people who used to be me, bouncing around with the other 2 million eggs for 35 years, but now they are them.
I’m watching my oldest sing “Dumb,” Kurt Cobain already 30 years dead. A boy still cutting himself on angel hair and baby's breath, in a way that feels like deja vu and looks like an alien.
I’m watching my youngest surf TrumpNation with 3-point shots on the Queen-Anne Yard and enough stuffed animals to make you wonder. Surf the dissection of her magical body, miracle of science, by the Supreme idiots.
I’m watching middle child levitate, baptized or branded, the sky full of signs. He watches me, watching him under a Hollywood sky of eyes. American beauty, Escape from America.
Young Americans all, flowing from inside to out, real to super real, subreal to too real. And robots are driving the cars, but the kids are still playing music and catching sun. These pictures are of the space between us collapsing, the space between all things collapsing.
To watch someone is to hold them apart, to see them is to remember them, a piece of yourself.
On Color
"I start every painting by covering the canvas with a really brilliant transparent colored ground... if I want a painting to have a lot of energy and intensity to it, I might pick a color that contrasts the main color of the image I'm going to end up with."
Rebecca Campbell
Hollywood is a sign, 2023
oil on canvas
60 x 120 in. (152.4 x 304.8 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Slide to see the painting's beginning and end.
Rebecca Campbell
Halcyon, 2023
oil on canvas
48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Images from Rebecca Campbell's studio. Los Angeles, CA, 2024.
On Lemons
"When I think about lemons, I think about sunlight, butter, you know, warm winter in California."
Rebecca Campbell
California Love, 2023
oil on canvas
80 x 106 in. (203.2 x 269.2 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Image from the artist's studio.
Los Angeles, CA, 2024.
Image from the artist's home.
Los Angeles, CA, 2024.
On Portraiture
"I see the portrait as a sort of empty vessel for any idea that you want to play with and in the contemporary American context, it's especially rich and fertile in terms of talking about politics and experiences and place and environment."
Rebecca Campbell
Young Americans series, 2024
oil on canvas
each work: 30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
signed and dated verso
paintings sold individually
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Rebecca Campbell
Where Have You Been My Blue-Eyed Son?, 2023
oil on canvas
48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Rebecca Campbell
In Utero, 2023
oil on canvas
80 x 80 in. (203.2 x 203.2 cm)
signed and dated verso
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On The Gaze
"For me, something that's complicated that idea [of the gaze] in a beautiful and rich way is motherhood."
Rebecca Campbell
puddle-wonderful, 2023
oil and gold leaf on panel
16 x 12 in. (40.6 x 30.5 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Rebecca Campbell
Dream, 2023
oil on panel
16 x 16 in. (40.6 x 40.6 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Rebecca Campbell
Pink Light, 2023
oil on panel
10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
signed and dated verso
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"...there is a sort of web of existence, a web of experience that ties us together and creates a kind of constant flow between things."
Rebecca Campbell
In Between, 2024
oil on canvas
80 x 120 in. (203.2 x 304.8 cm)
signed and dated verso
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Installation of Rebecca Campbell: Young Americans at L.A. Louver.
Photography by Robert Wedemeyer, 2024.
Additional resources