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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.
Colour functions as both spatial and emotional register within her work. Saturated passages sit alongside quieter tonal shifts, guiding movement across the surface while resisting any singular reading. These chromatic decisions are not descriptive but experiential, allowing the painting to operate as a field through which sensation, orientation and memory are negotiated.
Her paintings are shaped by an ongoing dialogue between observation and recollection. Drawing on the rhythms of Los Angeles, Ramírez constructs images that sit between internal and external worlds, where lived experience is translated into form. Earlier gestures remain visible within the surface, preserving traces of decision and revision so that each work reads as an evolving record of looking.
More recent works extend this language towards a more introspective register, where painting becomes a site of reflection and containment. Here, gesture takes on a notational quality and compositions unfold with a restrained intensity, balancing immediacy with control.
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, where she developed an enduring commitment to the material and spatial possibilities of paint.
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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 Reverse£ 10,750.00Further images
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