Pat Lasch

About Pat Lasch

Pat Lasch has been producing groundbreaking and provocative work for almost four decades. Born in New York City in 1944, the daughter of a seamstress and pastry chef, Lasch was tutored by her father in the art of pastry decoration. She honors these skills in her masterful manipulation of acrylic paint. Lasch’s elaborately decorated cakes and meticulously detailed fabric facsimiles transcend the ordinary to explore, as art historian Marshall Price notes, “a complex emotional terrain.” Art historian Grant Klarich Johnson writes, “Since the 1970s, Lasch’s unabashedly beautiful formal citations have evoked the props of familial ceremonies and the heirlooms carried from one generation to another…Unafraid of sentiment, Lasch’s practice embraces a sense of autobiography and private life as a universally stirring and politicized theme…” (With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, p. 292). The artist continues to engage with questions of tradition and ritual, aging and ancestry, and gender-based labor in her most recent work.

An early member of the pioneering cooperative A.I.R. Gallery, Lasch has participated in many individual and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Academy Museum, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lasch was given a major retrospective exhibition at The Palm Springs Art Museum, California, in 2017. Most recently, she was included in “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2019, which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in Spring 2021.

Listen to Pat discuss her work with fellow National Academician and A.I.R. member Dotty Attie.