STAGING - The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

Aldrich Projects | Larissa Bates: Motherland / La Madre Patria marks the artist’s first solo museum presentation, featuring three paintings in gouache, egg tempera, and acrylic ink. Central to her work is an exploration of her bicultural upbringing—bridging the cloud forests of Costa Rica with rural Vermont, where her father was part of the experimental architecture community in Prickly Mountain. Her robust visual language stitches together fragments of objects, rooms, and landscapes from her youth into reimagined histories, a framework through which she reconciles personal memory and feelings of cultural loss. 

Lavish decoration, ornately patterned rugs, and abundant plant life saturate her compositions, resulting in illustrations that pulse with energy. This vibrant world sets the stage for a cast of relatives—recurring protagonists in her work—ranging from her parents and grandparents to siblings and aunts, even the family pets. Blending intimate autobiographical narratives with dreamlike figures and uncanny tableaux, Bates conjures a mythic past in which fantasy and lived experience coalesce. Her work is deeply influenced by the Surrealism of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, Persian miniature painting, and seventeenth-century Mexican biombo screens. For Bates, familial connection, legacy, and longing continuously intermingle, opening onto a practice rooted in reinvention and remembrance.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a ‘zine.

Larissa Bates was born in Burlington, VT, in 1981, and grew up between Vermont and Vara Blanca, Costa Rica. She currently lives and works in Dobbs Ferry, NY.

Aldrich Projects | Larissa Bates: Motherland / La Madre Patria is organized by Caitlin Monachino, Curatorial and Publications Manager, as part of Aldrich Projects, a quarterly series that features one work or a focused body of work by a singular artist on the Museum's campus.