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Painting becomes a cartographic language of memory and movement, where abstraction holds the shifting experience of place without ever fixing it in time.
Lily Ramírez is a Los Angeles-based painter whose practice emerges from the lived experience of the city, unfolding as a sustained enquiry into memory, movement and place. Her work is informed by early encounters with the cartographic logic of Southern California, particularly Thomas Guides and the freeway systems of Los Angeles, where navigation became an intimate form of spatial understanding. These formative experiences continue to shape her visual language, in which mapping operates as both structure and memory.
Working predominantly in acrylic, Ramírez constructs her paintings through layered and repetitive mark-making, building surfaces that accumulate over time. Lines intersect and reconfigure, forming dense, shifting fields that suggest urban grids, pathways and fragmented terrains. Rather than offering fixed representations, her compositions operate as unstable cartographies, where geography, infrastructure and recollection are held in constant negotiation.
At the core of her practice is an interest in the tension between abstraction and structure. Aerial perspectives of cities and landscapes inform her approach, where built environments and natural forms can appear simultaneously ordered and dissolving. From this vantage point, her paintings hover between diagrammatic clarity and painterly abstraction, reflecting how different neighbourhoods and landscapes carry distinct identities shaped by density, vegetation, colour and development.
Across her practice, Ramírez positions painting as both a physical and psychological terrain. Through accumulation, colour and gesture, her work traces the intersections of memory and place, offering a sustained exploration of how contemporary environments are experienced, navigated and reimagined.
Ramírez studied Painting at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and has featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her work was displayed at The Armory Show in 2026, and she has been interviewed in CULTURE magazine.
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Works
Lily Ramírez
Me Going Back With You Never, 2025Oil and Oil Stick on Canvas121.92 x 81.28 cm
48 x 32 inSigned and Titled on ReverseFurther images
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ExhibitionsNewsPress -
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