If all the world’s a stage, then Kate Pincus-Whitney’s stage is the dinner table. With phosphorescent colours, maximalist flair, and layered stories of love, ritual, and memory, the Los Angeles-based artist transforms everyday objects into symphonies of self and place. Her canvases are feasts – not just for the eyes, but for the heart, head, and stomach.
A self-described ‘artist-anthropologist’, Pincus-Whitney builds her visual language from the things we eat, the objects we cherish, and the spaces we gather in; her paintings tell a story about who we are and what we hold dear.
Her solo exhibition, To Live and Dine in LA / You Taste Like Home, opened last year at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles and was, quite literally, a love letter to her city. Each work in the show was inspired by a different LA neighbourhood, mapping the metropolis not by grid or freeway, but by flavour, memory, and community.
Born in Santa Monica in 1993, Pincus-Whitney’s route to painting was paved early. Diagnosed with dyslexia and stereo-blindness (the inability to see depth) as a child, she found in art a language beyond words. She recounts her first attempts to read: ‘The Q’s became P’s, G’s became 9’s’. Without traditional depth perception, she developed a unique ability to render the three-dimensional world into striking two-dimensional visual planes, an ability that would later define her style.
Indeed, her still lifes are anything but still. They abound with energy, layered with trompe-l’œil illusions, gestural lines, and embedded words from Maya Angelou. Though they may look spontaneous, her works are meticulously researched and archived, and people are often surprised to learn that she doesn’t paint from anything from life. Instead, she saves images from life, her experiences, and childhood memories; the process is part art history, part archaeology, and part inner reflection.
Like any great theatre, her tableaus are immersive. Step into a Kate Pincus-Whitney painting and you’re surrounded by towering vases, glittering oysters, scattered dice, and ghosts of family meals past. There’s no empty space, just the generous fullness of what is termed horror vacui, or ‘the fear of the empty’. ‘I’m utilizing still life motifs, but they’re not at all still’, she explains.
And yet, beneath the joy and lushness of her scenes lies an unmistakable sense of reverence. Pincus-Whitney’s paintings are often described as shrines, and rightly so. They hum with layers of meaning: feminist, mystical, alchemical. Her use of sigil magic and memories of sandplay therapy – a technique her mother practices – filters through the compositions: ‘I realized my paintings were like my own sand trays’.
Perhaps that’s what makes Pincus-Whitney’s work feel so personal, and so universal. The meal is a ritual we all share, and her table welcomes everyone. ‘We all must eat’, she says. Kate Pincus-Whitney is rewriting the language of still life, not as a static genre, but as a living, breathing, talking table.
