There will be an artist reception on Saturday, February 17th, from 5-9 pm. Please join the artist and gallery in celebration.

The Trophy Room LA is thrilled to present Sweethearts, a solo exhibition by artist Amalia Angulo, from February 17 to March 23 2024. Inspired by Los Angeles’s beach culture, Angulo transmutes psychological turmoil into uncanny beach bodies in this new series of provocative paintings, which explores the tension between expectation and desire to offer a mode of being beyond social constraints.

The Sweethearts are coquettish but frightening figures who smile as they burn under blue skies, flaunting their swollen, visibly wounded bodies on incongruously comic beaches. Southern California’s ethos of idyllic vanity saturates these scenes, and these blonde, blue-eyed beachgoers stare at viewers, perfect teeth in high contrast against charred flesh, tight and tender. “What you see on their skin is how I imagine mental afflictions”—fear, guilt, and shame—“might look if they materialized in flesh,” Angulo says.

Throughout her work, Angulo uses figuration to untangle and enact the complexities of human psychology. By plumbing her subconscious and referencing AI-generated images to accentuate the artificiality of her highly-staged scenes, Angulo combines visceral, emotional truth with a sense of unreality—”this recurring feeling that life is a game, and we’re all inside,” the artist says. The juxtapositions in these paintings, combined with visual nods to ‘50s pinup culture and portraiture conventions, highlight the absurdity of the social norms governing our bodies as objects for public consumption. If life is a game, these players are breaking the rules. They are unabashed in their sexuality, bold in their burning.

Though she was born in Havana, Cuba, Angulo (b. 1980) grew up in the Dominican Republic, where she graduated from The Altos de Chavón School of Art and Design with a degree in fine art. Her practice interrogates human psychology through stylized vignettes of doll-like figures that exist between the idyllic and the unsettling. With their exaggerated and heavily sexualized bodies, her subjects confront us with disconcerting, wide-eyed gazes and stiff smiles. These works trouble notions of perfection and imposed limitations of being, visually riffing on art history and pop culture sources.

Angulo’s other recent solo exhibitions include Hunter at Stellarhigway in Brooklyn, NY, Super Happy at Sean Horton in New York, NY, and Happy at Hudson House in Hudson, NY, where she was also a resident artist. Angulo’s work can be found in private collections across North and South America, Europe and Asia.

The Trophy Room LA will host an artist reception on Saturday, February 17, from 5-9 p.m. Please join the artist and gallery in celebration. The exhibition checklist is available here. For more information or to inquire about any of the artwork in this exhibition, please email info@thetrophyroomla.com.

To inquire about any of the artwork in this exhibition, please email info@thetrophyroomla.com