Art Videos

Lily Ramírez: So Far Out of Sight / Simchowitz Hill House, Pasadena

Lily Ramirez, an abstract painter raised in South Central Los Angeles, is presenting her solo exhibition “So Far Out of Sight” at Stefan Simchowitz’s Hill House in Pasadena. The show features oil‑on‑canvas landscapes that serve as visual diaries of conversations, memories, and community dialogues, translating personal experience into a universal abstract language. Ramirez describes her process as a negotiation between the mind and the soul, positioning each work as the “middle child” that balances maximalist color with minimalist form. Influences such as Peter Doig, Jonathan Lasker and Robert Ryman inform her layered mark‑making, while music—ranging from silence to Bad Bunny—modulates the emotional charge she deposits on the canvas. Titles emerge from lyric snippets, family sayings, or fleeting memories, anchoring each abstract field in a concrete cultural reference. Specific pieces like “Wicked” and “Las Leos” illustrate how divergent emotional states converge through color, texture, and scale. Ramirez cites a Bad Bunny lyric—“drowning in emotions”—as the seed for a painting that visualizes internal turbulence, and she credits early exposure to Doig’s layered palettes for reshaping her understanding of fine art’s conversational potential. The exhibition signals Ramirez’s expanding reach, with a forthcoming solo show in London that will transport her South Central narrative onto an international stage. By marrying abstract form with bilingual titles, she creates entry points for diverse audiences, fostering cross‑cultural dialogue and challenging conventional expectations of what abstract art can convey.