Kim Dingle

b. 1951

Artist Kim Dingle is known for paintings, sculptures, and installations that deal with  American culture and history. Using both figurative and abstract styles, her art is often a provocative commentary on the roles of race, gender, and stereotypes. 

Dingle lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.F.A. from California State University, Los Angeles in 1988. When she was an undergraduate student, she worked as a house painter. She received her M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1990.  Her first solo exhibition, “Portraits from the Dingle Library,” combined images of her mother with figures such as George Washington, Queen Elizabeth II, and the boxer George Foreman. Her inspiration came from her mother’s belief that she is related to both George Washington and the Queen.

She took a hiatus from making art when she and her partner Aude Charles operated a restaurant called ‘Fatty’s’ for a dozen years in Eagle Rock, California. The break from painting renewed her love of making art so Dingle sold the restaurant and returned to the art world in 2013 with a show at Coagola Curatorial on Chung King Road in Los Angeles’ Chinatown.

Dingle often works in series. In the 1990s – before operating her restaurant – she began making installations, sculptures, and paintings of destructive little girls. Her “Priss” and “Wild Girl” paintings turn loose these destructive little girls, who wear frilly white dresses and black patent leather shoes. They tumble, wrestle, fight, chase one another, guzzle wine, play with their food, tip over tabes, bury their faces in frosting-covered cakes, and generally wreak havoc everywhere. They are often placed in landscape scenes or in front of a wallpaper background. According to Dingle, “Priss’ is like Shirley Temple as a psycho pit bull.” 

Her “Studies for the Last Supper at Fatty’s (Wine Bar for Children II)” is a 40-panel painting 6 feet tall and 40 feet long. It is a comic appropriation of  Leonardo’s “Last Supper” except that Dingle’s work depicts 10 plump girls at a bar with their backsides facing viewers. 

While blindfolded, Dingle changed it up by painting her demonic little girls in broad expressive brushstrokes in her “Blindfold Paintings.” She has made maps and abstractions inspired by the patterns of construction boards sold at Home Depot. Her “Crush” paintings began as works on glassine, which Dingle photographed and then painted over to create the final work. She then crumbled up the glassine and displayed it as a stack on the floor in front of the finished painting in her version of a diptych. 

Dingle has had solo shows at Sperone Westwater, Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, and Los Angeles Projects. Her work was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Her work is in the public collections of the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Museum of Contemporary Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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