Invitation, 2004-2024
SELECTED WORK
STATEMENT
I grew up in Los Angeles in the ’70s and ’80s. My work begins in 1986. It has carried several lines simultaneously since: paintings, sculpture, installation, performance, film, video, and photography.
The couch work began as a response to my fear of becoming an over-the-couch painter, that is to say one who makes paintings to match the couch, and I ended up deconstructing couches into paintings. The film paintings began as the inverse: an antidote to destruction by making canvas from film. As an artist working inside the film and entertainment industry, I wanted to stage an agonistic encounter between cinema and painting. The film canvas was a support for its own destruction; the oil paint was meant to eat through it. Painting triumphing over cinema. Or so I thought — but the film endured. After that, the inherent beauty of the film itself became the subject of the paintings, and the work continued as long as the industry kept producing the analogue material. Paint eventually re-entered the film paintings on different terms.
The film paintings are now in their fourth decade. Sources have varied across the decades: monochromatic factory-coated stock, hazy diffusion leader, cancelled 70mm reels scratched down the middle for sale as fill, transparent blue machine leader. Some of these forms are now obsolete; the paintings carry their material history with them.
The couch pieces run on a parallel track. Some are stripped to their foundational structures; some are painted or poured into; some are used as found; and lately the work has moved to in situ couch manipulations, photo-documentation, and iPhone videos of the performances.
The early installations Basic Plumbing (1986/1988) and Chimney (1991) remain at the center of the practice as the two locked rooms from which everything else has unfolded.
The goal has been to keep the work ahead of my understanding—to excite myself through the discoveries that occur in its making.
— Carter Potter
BIOGRAPHY
Carter Potter was born in Los Angeles in 1961. He earned a BA in 1987 and an MFA in 1990 from UCLA, where he studied with Paul McCarthy, Charles Ray, Nancy Rubins, Chris Burden, Roger Herman, and Lee Mullican. He has exhibited widely throughout the US and Europe, with selected solo exhibitions at Rocket, London (2000, 2022); Angles Gallery, Santa Monica (1995, 1998, 2002, 2003); Julie Saul Gallery, New York (2001, 2003, 2010); Sue Spaid Fine Art, Los Angeles (1990, 1991, 1993); Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston (1999, 2002); Numark Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2004); Galerie H. S. Steinek, Vienna (1997); and Jose Freire Fine Art, New York (1994). Recent solo exhibitions include Couch Triptych 1990–2024 at as-is, Los Angeles (2024); New Leaders at Alto Beta, Altadena (2023); FYC at Rocket, London (2022); and Torture Chamber at PRJCTLA, Los Angeles (2021).
Selected group exhibitions include HELLO, HELLO, HELLO, curated by Michelle Grabner, Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University (2025); Ongoing Compilation, Rocket, London (2025); TV EYE, Nan Rae Gallery, Woodbury University, Burbank (2025); LIGHT UNLOCKED, Rocket, London (2021); Transcendent Abstraction in Painting: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Sweeney Art Gallery, UC Riverside (2015); Truthiness: Photography As Sculpture, California Museum of Photography, Riverside (2008); Some Paintings: LA Weekly Annual Biennial, organized by Doug Harvey, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica (2008); Extreme Abstraction, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2005); the California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art (1997); Painting Outside Painting: 44th Biennial Exhibition of American Painting, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1995); and Against Nature, curated by Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins, LACE, Los Angeles (1989).
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Panza Collection, Varese; mumok (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig), Vienna; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; the Sweeney Art Gallery, UC Riverside; and the University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara.
His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Art in America, the New York Times, Der Standard, Die Presse, Newsweek, Artforum, Frieze, ARTnews, Art Issues, Artweek, Modern Painters, Artnet, New York Magazine, Art Papers, The Art Newspaper, Village Voice, and Less Art, among others. Potter lives and works in Los Angeles.