Women Breaking Through Pat Lasch

Pat Lasch, Ruth Elsava, 2018, cast and piped polymer paint, pearls, glass beads and pins on wood and foam structure, 18 x 9 inches

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we are sharing breakthrough moments of some of the gallery's women artists.

Pat Lasch’s four decades of groundbreaking work have their roots in the early 1970s when she joined the pioneering feminist A.I.R. Gallery. Lasch joined this cooperative group of women artists shortly after she turned from minimalism and began producing sumptuously decorated works using traditional techniques. Lasch had learned pastry decoration from her father, a German pastry chef, which she applied to create elaborately adorned cakes with paint, beads, and pearls. In both their appearance and meaning, Lasch’s cakes transcend the ordinary. They are at once deeply personal holders of family stories and remembrances, and also collective symbols that mark the passage of time. The cakes were first exhibited at the Holly Solomon Gallery, a major proponent of the Pattern and Decoration movement with which Lasch is closely associated.

Lasch at work.

Lasch’s work was most recently was included in “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985” at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Curator Anna Katz writes in the catalogue for the show that Lasch’s cakes, “[lavish] attention on that which is typically dismissed as girly, frilly, or silly—confectionary and its delights—in order to give sculptural form to humble, domestic rituals, like cake baking, by which we celebrate the occasions of our everyday lives.” “With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985” will be on view at the the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, from June 26 to November 28, 2021.

Lasch (front left) with members of A.I.R. Gallery, New York, 1978.

Pat Lasch's work is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Academy Museum, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. To view more of Lasch's work available through the gallery, please visit our website.