Lori Larusso’s paintings are a testament to her masterful handling of color, composition, and the human experience. Through her work, she explores themes of consumption, waste, gratification, and leisure, resulting in graphically precise depictions of anthropomorphic desserts, floral vases, and everyday objects.
- A melting chocolate ice cream cone with a childlike face, placed upside-down on a dish
- Two frosted coconut cakes set against a creamy white ground
These paintings, created during her time as a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), showcase Larusso’s unique ability to merge lush, flat, unblended areas of acrylic paint with her interest in consumption, waste, gratification, and leisure. Her use of color, composition, and anthropomorphic subjects creates a visually striking and thought-provoking art form.
| Lori Larusso’s artwork is a reflection of her fascination with the human experience and the way we interact with our surroundings. |
After leaving MICA, Larusso continued to develop her artistic style, exploring different possibilities and themes. Her work has become more adept and nuanced, as she has become more skilled as a painter. When I visited Larusso’s studio in Louisville, I saw three bodies of work, including two completed and one in progress for her first museum exhibition, A Paradox of Plenty. I was struck by the mastery of color relationships in her paintings, which comprise one strain of her art.
“Bourbon Rocks on Red” (2025) is a prime example of Larusso’s formal facility with color. The cylindrical glass is composed of interlocking red, pink, maroon, brown, and tan shapes, overlaid with small white accents. This painting typifies Larusso’s ability to create a tactile and perceptual surface that sits comfortably on the dividing line between abstraction and representation.
Larusso’s work is characterized by its use of color, which is both a tactile and a perceptual surface. Her paintings, such as “Bourbon Rocks on Red” (2025), remind me of the line in John Ashbery’s great poem, “Soonest Mended”: “a kind of fence-sitting/Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.”
For her series Ladyface Vase (1 – 14) (2024), Larusso depicts flowers in painted ceramic vases originally made by the California ceramicist and artist Betty Lou Nichols. These vases were created in the late 1940s and became popular for their head vases of movie actresses.
| Larusso’s Ladyface Vase series explores the power dynamics between women and men, the male gaze, and how society’s notion of refinement can make a consumer want to possess an object modeled on a movie actress. |
Formally, Larusso’s flowers are an exploration of color relationships. However, the head vase paintings also convey her interest in the power dynamics between women and men, the male gaze, and how society’s notion of refinement can make a consumer want to possess an object modeled on a movie actress.
| Larusso’s conceptualization of particular themes can be funny and unsettling, as in arranging broccoli stalks to make an oversized coiffed poodle. |
Larusso is a socially and politically conscious artist, but she never announces her intentions. Her conceptualization of particular themes can be humorous and thought-provoking, as in the installation “A Pastiche of Good Intentions and Other Parties.”
| Larusso’s artwork is a reflection of her fascination with the human experience and the way we interact with our surroundings. |
Over the past 20 years, Larusso has deepened her interest in how consumer society processes food and images so that they become surrogates and substitutes. Her work depicts an increasingly askew consumer-driven world riddled with false promises.
| Larusso’s artwork is a reflection of her fascination with the human experience and the way we interact with our surroundings. |
In “Midden” (2025), Larusso depicts a dead deer whose open stomach reveals a pile of trash. The painting takes a deadpan approach, juxtaposing the unlikely and eye-catching, grotesque, and comical.
| Larusso’s artwork is a reflection of her fascination with the human experience and the way we interact with our surroundings. |
Similarly, “Binge and Purge” (2025) portrays a mound of items piled up beneath a vertically oriented shopping cart. The painting suggests that in the cycle of consumption and waste that is central to every civilization, capitalism has inverted the relationship by purging waste that is more indestructible than what it binges.
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