Lily van der Stokker

Lily van der Stokker (b. 1954 Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City) has been making wall paintings and drawings since the 1980s, a time in which she also operated an art gallery in New York’s East Village, sharing a street with influential gallerists Colin de Land and Pat Hearn. Upon the closure of her gallery in 1986, van der Stokker has focused on making her own artwork, positioning the social context of art production at the forefront of her practice. In appearance, van der Stokker’s work can recall the bubbly, fanciful doodles found in the margins of a diary. Often accompanied by text, the cheerful colors and soft shapes are disarming in their immediacy, belying the radicalness of forefronting a ‘female’ aesthetic often dismissed as frivolous. In a 2010 interview with John Waters, van der Stokker remarked, “Sweetness as subject matter is still really hard to get for many people. It’s tricky because the work looks simple. I would love to make art that’s understandable by everybody...but over the years, I think I’m doing complicated things.”

Selected solo exhibitions include: Frac Normandie, Caen, France (2024); The High Line, New York (2023); Coda Museum, Apeldoorn, Netherlands (2023); kaufmann repetto, Milan (2022); Paker Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Camden Art Centre, London (2022); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015); New Museum, New York (2013); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010); and Tate St. Ives (2010). Van der Stokker has undertaken two large-scale public commissions. In 2000 she created The Pink Building, for which she painted the entire exterior and roof of a building for the World’s Fair in Hannover, Germany, and she designed a large ceramic teapot, Celestial Teapot, for the roof of a high-rise shopping centre in Utrecht, Netherlands, in 2013.