Christopher Knight reviews the exhibition Lari Pittman: From a Late Western Impaerium at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, on view November 9 – December 21, 2013.

Knight writes that "Pittman's inescapable polemic points straight to what this art is: painting… In a lecture Wednesday night to a full auditorium at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Pittman simply said, 'De-skilling doesn't really work with paintings.' The extraordinarily skillful work, large and small, in his new show is pretty convincing proof. Within the rectangle of a painting, whether on paper a few inches square or wood panels the size of a ballroom wall, an artist can exert the absolute power – the Late Western Impaerium — of individual imagination. We may be living through a grim social period, which these paintings emphatically acknowledge. But it is also a time not without hope."