Charlotte Keates

Charlotte Keates is known for paintings of architectural interiors that evoke the utopianism and anxiety of the 1960s and ’70s. Keates’s work borrows its visual vocabulary from architectural drawings and blueprints and draws inspiration from modern architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller. Her tranquil residential scenes feature familiar tropes of mid-century modern art and architecture, like clean lines, swimming pools, and palm trees, but her use of surrealist perspectives provokes an unsettling feeling of disorientation. She creates an almost dreamlike sense of déjà vu with atmospheric tableaux that stems from both memory and imagination. Lacking any figures, Keates’s paintings encourage the viewer to place themselves in the environments she depicts, as if entering a stranger’s empty home, unsure if and when they will return.

-Artsy