An Architect, a Minotaur, and a Painter

“I am haunting Le Corbusier,” Lily Stockman reflects from her Frogtown, Los Angeles studio as the last of the morning fog burns off, a week out from her opening at the Fondation Le Corbusier. We circumnavigate a miniature, white foam model of the late architect’s geometric building, where her works are now on display until June 29.

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Eleven new works by the painter unfold in inspired hues at Maison La Roche in an exhibition titled “Minotaur.” Created with the space in mind, Stockman’s works are interlocutors between herself and the architect, who became a north star in the process. The building, with its white facade and colorful walls—part of Le Corbusier’s Purist home series—was originally commissioned by Raoul La Roche as a space to live and hold his art collection in the 1920s. More recently, it has taken on a second life with robust, contemporary programming that invites rising artists such as Ludovic Nkoth and Carla Accardi to display site-specific works throughout its rooms.

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In LA, Stockman hovers her fingers over the middle of the model where a cutout hints at a tree that it was built around. This was the first and only time he submitted to a natural force, she muses. “He wanted to have this kind of fixed point in the center from which everything was possible,” she adds as we remove the roof and peer into the maze-like pathways. “From the opposite end of the building, you can see across to this painting,” she points through the window. Her buttery blonde bangs frame her rosy cheeks as she leans across the structure, and the cerulean blue of her sweater cuts an angular shape across a painting behind her. 

“It became this deep research project,” the artist reminisces on the recent months as we crouch down at eye level to look at the replicas of her paintings scaled to size on the Lilliputian walls. Her practice is ekphrastic, as she puts it. “I'm looking for some sort of structure that the paintings can then be held in.” 

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Stockman has always been interested in pushing the limitation imposed by the rectangle. She thinks about her paintings “almost like this unfolded gift drawing,” she says, “a kind of bilateral symmetry, folding or rorschaching.” Her source material is expansive: origami-like ​​Shaker gift drawings, Stanley Whitney’s colorful grids, Emily Dickinson’s poems written on the posterior of an envelope, Joan Mitchell’s dahlia garden, the landscape of the Mojave Desert, Philip Glass' Etudes—the latter which inspired a suite of paintings born from a three-hour concert at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall earlier this year. 

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For the new exhibition, the painter enmeshed herself in the world of Le Corbusier: a few biographies, his conceptual designs, his own paintings and collages, the way his structures choreograph lighting and display art. She embraced his interest in Greek mythology and honed in on the Minotaur (who, as the story goes, lives in a single-path maze).

Every night, she scrolled through stories reposted by the foundation and watched visitors traverse the floor plan. She noticed, chiefly, how people glided up and down the curved ramp. “He wanted to avoid the kind of percussive, staccato experience of going up or down stairs,” she says of the architect. “He wanted the body to float through the elevations of the building.” 

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Each new work by Stockman is an amalgamation of color and references—in Black Pansy, 2024, for instance, a pigmented close-up of petals blend purple from the artist’s time in India with orange and black from the building’s interior. The flower motif is culled from art history as well as her own LA garden (a fragrant landscape of creeping thyme, roses, salvia, sage, french lavender, snapdragons, sweet peas, carnations). Elsewhere, Clouds Over Vétheuil, 2024, is a rich and tactile meditation on the sky, rendered in meticulous periwinkle and apricot strokes.

From far away, the paintings pose coherent walls of color and shapes, up-close borders bend and textures jump out. This layered approach is a natural inclination for a painter with a life-long interest in translation, who spent her high school years interpreting Latin texts into English. “I think of my painting practice as symmetrical with that,” Stockman says. “It is almost like this respiratory mechanism of going in and coming out in the paintings when they're all installed together, which makes me think about speech and poetry and reading out loud.” In Metronome, 2024, an orchid peak framed by a black, apricot and blue border, will keep rhythm with the day, she tells me as she anticipates the light that will stream through the window and onto the canvas.

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While the connection between Le Corbusier and Stockman, the first American woman to have work displayed in this space, is front and center today, the architect has been on the periphery of the painter’s mind for much longer. “He has been this avuncular character in my life,” she reflects. Her first encounter with Le Corbusier’s design was as a student at Harvard. She studied painting in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and contemplated the effects of lighting in his Brutalist, concrete and glass structure. In the winter, her and her friends would take cafeteria trays and sled down its three story ramp.

Her second encounter with a Le Corbusier design was in Jaipur, while she was studying miniature paintings. A visit to Punjab to see Nek Chand’s Rock Garden amidst the rubble of the buildings destroyed to make room for the post-partition capital. She found herself gazing up at Le Corbusier’s imposing, ultra-modern Chandigarh Capitol Complex, which is surrounded by shallow pools of water. “He wanted a reflection of the magnificence of democracy, these lofty ideas and architecture,” she explains, “but the buildings were falling down around it.”

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Now at the Maison La Roche, Stockman centers this spatiotemporal dialogue. Since those early days in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Jaipur, architecture has seeped into her art and vice versa. She credits this profound shift to her gallery Massimodecarlo and its unconventional spaces—a Georgian townhouse in London, an Art Deco space in Milan. “Until then, I'd never really had the opportunity to be the snail that can slip into a bigger shell,” Stockman muses. Now she is expanding, “with all of these ideas moving into a different container.”

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“Lily Stockman: Minotaur” is on view through June 29 at Maison La Roche at 8-10 Sq. du Dr Blanche, 75016 Paris, France.