For more than sixty years, Cynthia Carlson’s paintings, installations, sculpture, drawing, and public art projects have defied categorization. Possessing an adventurous and often restless artistic spirit, she has consistently pushed boundaries and experimented with various styles and techniques. As a pioneer in the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s, she created immersive installations by applying thickly painted swirls and squiggles of paint directly onto the walls with a cake decorating tool. 

Since then, her work has continued to change and evolve through innovative explorations of color, shape, and pattern. While much of Carlson’s career has been ground-breaking, she has always maintained a witty outlook, crediting “a healthy sense of play” as an important ingredient in her artmaking process. Serious Play presents a focused view of Carlson’s work from the last two decades and includes paintings and a series of artist books. Several of the paintings feature cat toys set against jumbled layers of colorful patterns and tilting perspectives. In more recent work Carlson continues to “shift the edges” of painting by incorporating multiple panels, irregular shapes, and imagery that is lighthearted and even playful.