Alake Shilling

Alake Shilling builds an imaginative world in which cuteness, melancholy, and material rigor coexist. Her paintings and ceramics feature wide-eyed hybrid creatures—resembling frogs, bears, or bugs—which reference children’s cartoons, pop iconography, and Afro-diasporic visual traditions. These beings carry complex emotional charges: sadness, ecstasy, doubt, and amusement. Shilling’s ceramics are the products of intuition and finely honed skill. Their abject materiality extends the legacy of California funk while their surreal, sometimes grotesque figuration aligns them with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists working in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s known for their cartoon-like forms, bold colors, and irreverent humor. Sculptures such as The Artist Reimagined as a Turtle Bug (2025), a brilliantly glazed ceramic, are difficult to pin down—testing our capacity for personification and the limits of psychological transference. The worlds that Shilling constructs purposefully court irresolution, contradiction, and the quick and continuous slippage from one state of being to another. In other words, what may seem like fantasy in fact refracts the messiness of everyday life.

Alake Shilling was born in 1993 in Los Angeles. Wrought with dark humor and nostalgia, Shilling’s ceramics and paintings resonate with a millennial generation familiar with the designs of Lisa Frank, only her fantastic cartoon creatures and landscapes take on unsettling dispositions. Recent solo exhibitions include the Palm Springs Art Museum, CA (2024); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2023, 2021); 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2018); and Maitland Foley, Los Angeles (2016). Recent group exhibitions include Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2025, 2023, 2021, 2019); Sargent’s Daughters, New York (2024); Somerset House, London (2024); Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); CONTROL Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, France (2023); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2023); Public Access, New York (2022); Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles (2020); NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL (2019); Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2019, 2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2018); Karma International, Los Angeles (2018); Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2018); and Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2018). Shilling studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Los Angeles City College.