Llyn Foulkes

(American, born 1934)

Llyn Foulkes is a contemporary American artist and musician known for his collages, heavily textured paintings, and solo performances using a self-made musical instrument he calls “The Machine.” Inspired by his own disillusionment with American consumerism and the American West, Foulkes often employs relics of nostalgia and hope, including postcards of tourist landmarks, bald eagle insignia, images of Mickey Mouse, and self-portraits. “Oh, that’s cute. It’s like a joke,” he once decried of Andy Warhol’s artwork. “That’s all I could think of it. I’m looking at the paintings and, well, anybody could have done them. And yet, I knew that one of my huge paintings which had recently been on display and took seven years to complete would sell for far less than one of his soup cans.” Born on November 17, 1934 in Yakima, WA, he studied both music and art at the Central Washington College of Education before being drafted in the Army in 1954. In 1957, Foulkes moved to Los Angeles where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute and began exhibiting alongside Ken Price and Ed Ruscha at the famed Ferus Gallery. Largely absent from the art world since the 1980s, in 2013, Foulkes was the subject of major retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles as well as the documentary film Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, directed by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. He continues to live and works in Los Angeles, CA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.