Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present a new group of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Esther Pearl Watson for Frieze New York 2021. The works will also be on view in the Greenhouse space at the gallery from May 5-15. Continuing her series of diaristic narrative paintings documenting the Covid-19 pandemic as it unfolds, Watson’s works give a personal perspective filtering the timeline and reality of living through the pandemic through her own life in Los Angeles. Picking up from where her first series of pandemic paintings left off, these new works date from November of 2020 through March of 2021. Chronicling life post-election, these paintings document the height of the pandemic in Los Angeles as the city became the national epicenter of the crisis and as the nation transitioned presidential administrations and the vaccine rollout began. Through the details of each work, Watson records both the mundane and the surreal details of living through the pandemic displaying both the resilience and fragility of our existence.

Esther Pearl Watson (b. 1973) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her series of pandemic paintings will be the subject of a solo exhibition later this year at The Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Western Michigan University. Her paintings have been exhibited at Concord Center for the Visual Arts, Concord, MA, Contemporary Art Museum of Plainview, Plainview, TX, University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Parkside, WI, Maureen Paley Gallery in London, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, amongst others. In 2013 she was Artist-in-Residence at Grafikiens Hus, Mariefred, Sweden. Her award-winning comic “Unlovable” was published in Bust Magazine and with Fantagraphics. She has published Blood Lady Commandos on Vice online and Welcome to Crapland on Adult Swim online. She has taught at Oxbow Artist Residency, the Lexicon of Sexicana at Columbia College in Chicago, and is currently teaching at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, California.