Urgent Care

Join us for the opening reception of Urgent Care to celebrate Los Angeles-based artist Justine Di Fiore’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Drawing on decades of work as a nursing assistant and the experience of caring for her mother at the end of her life, Di Fiore’s oil paintings and works on Yupo paper depict supine, fragile bodies being held, soothed and lulled. In a civic crisis where mutual aid and neighborly care have proven themselves a potent antidote to the indiscriminate brutality of Operation Metro Surge, Di Fiore locates resilience in an insistence upon dignity during our most vulnerable moments. Working on heavily sanded canvases that accentuate her expressive brushstrokes, the artist builds transitory, aqueous environments whose ambiguous relationship between fore- and background suggest a continuity between this world and the next. Unclothed and at rest, Di Fiore’s elegiac figures are evocative of various art historical expressions of care, including Michaelangelo’s Pieta and Henry Moore’s wartime drawings of Londoners sheltering in the city’s underground.