kim west

<<<  C'est moi, Kim West. I am a painter, and my visual arts practice incorporates studio painting, mural making, and installation projects activated with collaborative performance. 

Most who know my work are familiar via Instagram, or from murals located throughout California, including Only One Way Through, an expansive 5-story mural commissioned by Hauser Wirth on the exterior of their Los Angeles gallery and described as “dreamlike” by the New York Times, and more recently, Kaleidoscope (How'd Ya Get to be Happiness?). At over 122,000 square feet, the project is a meandering imagined landscape that is environmental in scope, spans multiple façades, sits in the Magnolia Marsh wetland on the PCH in Huntington Beach, and clocks in as the largest mural in California.

My work engages with memories, reflections, washy landscapes, and color-forward, often technicolor bright botanical motifs. Fractured realities become allegorical events. A developing exploration of layer-painting work literally and figuratively expands on notions of what happens when sacred memories begin to fade.

Following studies in printmaking, photography, painting, and literature at Smith College, Amherst College and the Instituto de Allende, I graduated from the painting department at Rhode Island School of Design.