Ari Lankin
Photo: Self-portrait
The elusive flow state is nurtured through daily practice. Showing up is the one thing I can control, and I do my best to let painting be a mirror and lens of living.
Ari Lankin (b. West Chester, Pennsylvania) is a New York and Brasil based painter whose work engages the intersection of the picture plane and material experimentation. His work includes abstraction and representation, he approaches painting as a physical and visual based practice shaped by intuition, revision, and direct engagement with paint, observation, and memory.
Photo: Charlie Rubin
There is an old saying about life that feels true to my relationship with painting: you don't know until you try. Every time I paint, I learn something new. The deeper I go into the medium, the more I realize there is no ceiling to what there is to know. That paradox is a gift. I am a painter because painting is a journey of mind, body, and soul, rooted in exploration rather than destination.
Central to Lankin's practice is an inventive and exploratory use of materials. The hunger for different methods of painting reinforce his fixation to explore the physicality of painting.
His process remains open and adaptive, with paintings evolving through revision and chance. Alongside abstractions, his representational works build from observation, imagination, and memory. They feel intimate and universal.
Lankin's practice is shaped by more than twenty-five years of studio work and a sustained engagement with art history, alongside over a decade working as a gallery guide at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This long immersion has sharpened his attention to seeing, material evaluation, and the history of things. His life spent between dense urban environments and immersive natural settings continue to inform his sense of rhythm, space, patterns, and light.
His paintings engage the picture plane as an active field and a window into worlds. A slippery combination he feels is essential to a good painting. Paint is treated as both substance and image. Each work develops according to its own internal logic, emphasizing responsiveness over preconception.
Lankin's work operates within a lineage of painters who approached painting as a mode of living through material, perception, and form. Resonances with artists such as Rembrandt, Philip Guston, and Claude Monet emerge not through quotation, but through shared concerns with surface tension, spatial stability, and emotional charge. Rather than referencing the past directly, his paintings extend these conversations through personal sensibility and inventiveness.
In a cultural landscape shaped by speed and image saturation, Lankin's work insists on invention, risk, and presence. His paintings unfold over time, rather than resolve into fixed meaning.
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 Brasil and USA.
EDUCATION
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Graduated Cum Laude May 2003
B.A. degrees in Fine Arts with high honors and Economics
Brandeis Journalism Program completed May 2003
Faculty nominated Undergraduate Departmental Representative in Fine Arts
Photography at Wellesley College 2002
Glassblowing at Massachusetts College of Art 2002
Silk Screen at Massachusetts College of Art 2001