Cactus Bloom, Clip-on, Cufflinks, Wrangler

Michael Lombardo (b. 1990, Norman, Oklahoma) makes paintings that depict objects and ephemera associated with the American West and the Great Plains. Regional references and allusions to memory appear across his body of work, capturing fleeting moments and significant heirlooms carefully rendered in his highly detailed and magnified compositions.

Traces of landscape appear throughout, charging the canvases with a keen sense of time and place. Red dirt, for example, unique to Oklahoma’s iron-rich soil, is collected from Lombardo’s visits back to his birth state, providing not just a formal texture to the canvas but also a gesture to home that materially provides an autobiographical layer to the works. Light is also utilized as formative material in Lombardo’s tableaux, foregrounding the sheen of a signature cufflinks, the glisten of its satin bow tie, and collected weathered western wear. Lombardo distorts the imagery and the perspectives of the classic objects sourced from his personal collections and experiences, allowing him to transform recognizable mise-en-scènes into vivid explorations that celebrate the quiet moments of cherished regional memory and fleeting everyday life.

Michael Lombardo has been the subject of two-person and group exhibitions
at 1226, Dallas (2023); Barbati, Venice (2023); G/ART/EN Gallery, Como, Italy (2023); and Brackett Creek Exhibitions, New York (2022). Lombardo lives and works in Los Angeles.