Feature Project
Feature Project
Alake Shilling
In collaboration with Tlaloc Studios
Buggy Bear, a character from Alake Shilling’s paintings and sculptures, at 25 feet tall.
The work
Buggy Bear extends Alake Shilling’s ongoing Buggy Bear character world into a large-scale inflatable. Shilling draws on imagery associated with childhood, such as toys, cartoons, stuffed animals, and fantasy characters, to explore more complex emotional and social experiences. Scaled up to monumental size, the work moves between the intimate and the monumental, inviting viewers to encounter a whimsical character at an unexpected scale.
Buggy Bear was originally commissioned by Art Production Fund and the Hammer Museum for Made in L.A. 2025 as a public-facing extension of Shilling’s sculptural practice.
Artist statement
Alake Shilling’s multidisciplinary practice examines the construction of emotional and imaginative worlds through painting and sculpture. Drawing from the visual languages of animation, cartoons, toys, popular culture, and important monuments of human development, Shilling develops an expansive cast of anthropomorphic figures, animals, and objects that inhabit psychologically charged, fantastical environments. Her work occupies a space between figuration and world-building, using recognizable forms as vessels for more ambiguous emotional states.
About the artist
Alake Shilling was born in 1993 in Los Angeles. Wrought with dark humor and nostalgia, her ceramics and paintings resonate with a millennial generation familiar with the designs of Lisa Frank, only her fantastic cartoon creatures and landscapes take on unsettling dispositions.
Recent solo exhibitions include Palm Springs Art Museum (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2023, 2021); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2018); and Maitland Foley, Los Angeles (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Sargent’s Daughters, New York; Somerset House, London; Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Shilling studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles City College.
Images
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