Born 1989 | Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Los Angeles–based artist Cindy Phenix paints vibrant, fractured compositions that suggest ambiguous narratives related to systems of power, social convention, and the environmental crisis. Each canvas is populated by chimerical figures, amoebic forms, and elements of architecture and landscape that intermix, dissolving and cohering in abstract gestures. The eye moves between passages where narrative figuration is foregrounded and those that revel in the raw materiality of paint. Characters—often monstrous or spectral—recur across Phenix’s paintings, creating an overarching sense of a fugue-like universe in which the artist plays out utopian and dystopic scenarios.
Collage guides Phenix’s work, both technically and conceptually. Drawing material from such sources as National Geographic and Netherlandish master paintings, she creates collages in Photoshop, abstracting and enlarging details and playing with context. She then projects these images onto linen and traces the projected outlines, incorporating distortions from shadow and light. She works with pastel under gesso to generate atmosphere, adding oil stick, oil paint mixed with wax, and occasionally fragments of textiles. In the space of one canvas, she explores paint’s many effects: from dusty and transparent to opaque impasto. For Phenix, the collage form reflects notions of synthesis, collectivity, and unity—conditions that might offer an antidote to the exigent social and environmental issues of our time.
The concept of interconnectedness is fundamental to Phenix’s recent work, which considers the Anthropocene and the indelible impact humans have had on our planet. Here, she meditates on ecological changes, losses, and disasters, including those caused by unsustainable fishing and agricultural practices, deforestation, and industrial emissions and waste. Abstractly, she references the loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, ghost nets, and wildfires. These scenes picture humans, animals, insects, sea life, flora, and bacteria inhabiting shared space, none prioritized over the other. The forms are seemingly mutable and in flux, always interdependent. In this way, Phenix processes anxiety and grief, arriving at hope.
