Chez Max et Dorothea is pleased to announce that Sunny and Warm, a solo survey exhibition featuring paintings and works on paper by Thomas Lawson, has been extended until Saturday, March 22nd due to the outstanding reception of the exhibition.

Spanning three decades, from 1994 to 2024, Sunny and Warm showcases a selection of Lawson’s paintings and works on paper that illuminate his evolving exploration of allegory, public imagery, and personal narrative. The exhibition will remain on view at Chez Max et Dorothea’s Los Angeles headquarters through March 22, 2025.

The title Sunny and Warm reflects a personal and introspective turn in Lawson’s practice. “For many years I have worked with public imagery, culling newspapers, magazines, websites for material that speaks to the moment,” Lawson explains. “But the frightening stupidity of the past eight or nine years has really gotten to me, and I found I no longer wanted to spend time in my studio thinking about another catastrophe. And then I came across a forgotten box of letters my mother wrote to her mother around the time I was born, and I began exploring her handwriting as a way to think about my life now.”

This exhibition highlights Lawson’s ability to navigate between cultural critique and personal storytelling, offering works that intertwine public and private histories. Sunny and Warm reflects Lawson’s enduring engagement with representation, appropriation, and narrative. Since his pivotal 1981 Artforum essay Last Exit: Painting—a critical call for the resurgence of painting as a vital artistic practice—Lawson has continued to push the boundaries of the medium, weaving fragments of history, culture, and memory into his work.

The New World Series, for instance, explores the interplay between image and ground, surface and depth. Inspired by Domenico Tiepolo’s mural depicting a procession of figures gazing toward a distant horizon, Lawson instead shifts focus to intricate surface patterns that pass over and through his figures. Some works in this series feature CalArts students as models, reflecting Lawson’s role as an educator and his ongoing interest in fractured cultural narratives.

In addition to his influential studio practice, Lawson served for three decades as the Dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he continues to teach and inspire new generations of artists. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as Metro Pictures in New York, Anthony Reynolds in London, David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, and LAXART in Los Angeles.

Surveys of Lawson’s work have been organized by the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art at La Jolla, the CCA in Glasgow, and the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas. Important group exhibitions include The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the inaugural Made in L.A. biennial in 2012, Ends and Exits: Contemporary Art from the Collections of LACMA and The Broad Art Foundation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2013, and A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1989. Beyond his art, Lawson’s contributions to art discourse—including the founding of Real Life Magazine and critical essays like Last Exit: Painting—have profoundly shaped contemporary understandings of art and representation. Since 2010, Lawson has served as the founding editor-in-chief of East of Borneo, an online publication that explores contemporary art and its history through the lens of Los Angeles.

His early Viennese/Los Angeles Diptychs juxtapose interior spaces drawn from his surroundings in Los Angeles and an asylum in Vienna with found media images, often inverted. These works reveal Lawson’s fascination with mirroring and inversion, investigating how context and orientation transform perception and meaning.

The exhibition also includes larger-scale works such as Dance Theory and Lightfoot. These paintings delve into the dynamics of space and motion, with depictions of footprints, diagrams, and patterns that extend Lawson’s inquiry into the fragmentation and movement of cultural symbols across surfaces. In a more personal turn, Sunny and Warm features Lawson’s latest series: text-based paintings inspired by letters exchanged between his mother and grandmother, a correspondence sent between Algiers and Glasgow during the early 1950s. These works represent a shift from public imagery toward personal narrative, blending collage techniques and textual layering to explore themes of memory, identity, and the passage of time.

“Since I began my career, I’ve worked across mediums and modes,” Lawson reflects. “I came up at a time when painting was supposedly dead, and artists could work in many media. I didn’t believe the proposition about painting but took the idea of a hybrid working method seriously.”

Emerging from the Pictures Generation in the late 1970s and 1980s, Lawson first gained recognition as a Scottish artist living in New York. Alongside contemporaries like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Jack Goldstein, he appropriated imagery from mass media to critique entrenched visual narratives. While rooted in this context, his work also aligns with the legacy of Surrealism, probing hidden dimensions of imagery through appropriation and introspection.