ABOUT

  •  His paintings simultaneously obliterate and reinforce the picture plane. 

    Ari Lankin (b. 1980, West Chester, PA) is a painter based in New York and Brasil. His work focuses on the experience of looking and how a painting can change the longer you spend time with it. Working between abstraction and recognizable forms, Lankin allows each painting to develop through process, intuition, and discovery rather than following a fixed plan.

    Color, gesture, and texture play an active role in his work, creating a physical and emotional response rather than a single, prescribed meaning. His paintings invite viewers to slow down, look closely, and build their own relationship with the work over time.

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         Lankin’s practice is shaped by more than twenty five years of studio work, sustained study of art history, and over a decade as an educator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This long engagement has sharpened his attention to seeing, material, and the history of painting, while his life between dense urban environments and regular returns to nature continues to inform his sense of balance, rhythm, and space.

     

         His paintings engage the picture plane as an active field and at the same time as a window. Paint is treated as both substance and event, built, disrupted, and reworked through direct physical engagement. Each work develops according to its own internal logic, allowing intuition and response to guide decisions as the painting evolves.

    Lankin’s work sits within a lineage of painters who approached painting as a way of thinking through form, materiality, and perception. Echoes of artists such as Rembrandt, Klee, and Guston appear not through quotation but through shared concerns with surface, structure, signature approach, and emotional presence. Rather than referencing the past directly, his paintings extend these conversations through contemporary and personal sensibility.

         In a culture dominated by speed and constant imagery, Lankin’s work emphasizes attention, risk, and presence. His paintings ask to be experienced, offering space for reflection, uncertainty, and sustained looking.

    Lankin’s work is held in public and private collections and has been shown across institutional, commercial, and public contexts. He lives and works between Manhattan, New York and Florianopolis, Brasil.