On February 3, 2013, the Hammer Museum opened LLYN FOULKES, an extensive retrospective devoted to the Los Angeles painter, assemblagist, and musician. The museum's exhibition page documents the exact run from February 3 to May 19, 2013 and describes a survey of about 150 works from public and private collections in the United States and Europe. Organized by Hammer curator Ali Subotnick, the show presented the breadth of Foulkes's career, from early cartoons and macabre 1960s paintings to rock paintings, the bloody head series, anti-corporate tableaux, Disney critiques, and documentation of his one-man musical instrument, the Machine. It helped consolidate Foulkes's position as a major, difficult-to-classify figure in West Coast postwar art.
The retrospective brought renewed institutional attention to an artist long influential in Los Angeles but under-recognized nationally.
