NADA New York

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
Booth: B116                                                                                          
NADA New York 2025                                                                   
May 7–11, 2025         

For NADA NY 2025 in Booth B116, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to exhibit a solo presentation of paintings by California artist Laura Krifka that depict figures in intimate moments within carefully constructed interiors. At the heart of Krifka’s practice are post-modern and contemporary critiques of canonical Painting—Krifka treats the false dichotomies of subject and object, women, men and gender fluid, observer and observed as jumping off points before bending or breaking the rules and moving on to more nuanced and poetic concerns. Her recent paintings continue the examination of popular culture's obsession with gender and desire amid heated political agendas and present a deeper investigation into how these portrayals affect our perception and treatment of others and ourselves. She explores her protagonists in both provocative and vulnerable situations, navigating her paintings with remarkable detail and care in pursuit of a more profound understanding of the nature of desire. 

Krifka’s subjects exist in candid moments—reading, daydreaming, watching, dressing, and waiting—framed by psychologically charged vignettes of domestic interiors, provoking conversations of power and agency. The works revel in ambiguity with figures cropped by the edges of the canvases, shadows, or architectural details, deliberately fracturing spaces and bodies. A notable element in Krifka’s work are the idiosyncratic wallpapers with mid-century modern and 1970s motifs that appear to direct the viewer’s gaze rather than lay flat. These imagined patterns create parallel planes of space, shift color and shape inexplicably, and build psychological tension, functioning like maps for the dream logic of each painting. On the edge of these paintings, moments of extreme and exuberant beauty embodied in the flicker of light or beads of water resting like jewels on a ledge, reveal radical encounters with the sublime.

Laura Krifka (b.1985, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in San Luis Obispo, CA where she serves in the studio art faculty at California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo. Krifka received her MFA from UC Santa Barbara in 2010 and her BFA from California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo in 2008, following earlier studies at Newbold College in England and Avondale College in Australia. Krifka’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Xioa Museum of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China.