When Los Angeles–based artist Kira Maria Shewfelt began painting kisses, she encountered a problem: On canvas, these passionate images appeared violent. The figures seemed to suffocate each other. The artist reconfigured her renderings so they’d work in the symbolic, romantic register she sought. In one of her oil paintings, Lohengrin Supernova (2023–24), the figures’ lips barely brush. Yet their blushing cheeks and Shewfelt’s decorative confetti flourishes suggest tenderness and love.
These values bear out across the 14 canvases at Make Room in Los Angeles, where Shewfelt’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, titled “The Yearlings,” is on view from April 20th through May 25th. The artist varies her scale and subject matter: A 55-by-83-inch diptych, The Sanctuary (2023–24), depicts horses and a lithe rider amid a flowered grove, while a smaller canvas, Kitchen Cat Draw (2023), features a mother and child who sit and paint at the edge of a sunlit kitchen. Pairs of lovers appear across the show, their stories simultaneously allegorical and specific. For the artist, the more “epic” or “fantasy-based” scenes are no different from the domestic scenes. “The show is really about the transformativequality of touch,” Shewfelt said, “about this moment of connection.”
