Lily Stockman (b. 1982, Providence, RI) is a painter based in Los Angeles. Drawing from nature and its grammar of symmetry, camouflage, and repetition, Stockman plumbs her familiar landscapes (shaggy Los Angeles canyons, the vast Mojave Desert, a remote island in Maine) to establish her singular language of abstraction. Stockman's paintings emerge from a wide range of references, from natural phenomena —vernal pools, mineral licks, birdsong, black ice— to historical devotional endeavors —Shaker gift drawings, medieval hocketing, portable Renaissance altarpieces, poetry meter. Her essays have appeared in numerous publications, most recently in Joan Mitchell: 1979–1985 (David Zwirner, 2024). 

Stockman’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington, DC), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (Miami, FL), Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), Palm Springs Art Museum (Palm Springs, CA), Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts), Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, ME), Aïshti Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), and the Orange County Museum of Art (Costa Mesa, CA), where she was included in the 2022 California Biennial, Pacific Gold.

Recent exhibitions explored Virginia Woolf’s modern novel The Waves at Massimo De Carlo, London (2023); birds, plants, and weather in Emily Wilson’s English translation of Homer’s Odyssey at Gagosian, Athens (2023); and early modernist architecture at Fondation Le Corbusier, Paris (2024). Her first solo museum exhibition will open in 2026 at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome.

“Stockman's compositions are both diagrammatic and vaporous, a combination that calls to mind the spiritualist abstractions of the American modernist Agnes Pelton. Although they’re more lyrical, Stockman’s nested shapes also have the meticulous magic of Josef Albers’s squares.”

—Johanna Fateman, The New Yorker