Piper Bangs

Piper Bangs was born in 2002 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a painter who graduated in 2024 from the Laguna College of Art and Design with a Bachelor’s degree in Painting and Drawing. Bangs has held solo exhibitions at Megan Mulrooney Gallery in Los Angeles and The Watermill Center in New York, and her work has also been shown at institutions and galleries including the Sehwa Art Museum in Seoul, Uffner & Liu Gallery in New York, The Pit in Palm Springs, Contemporary at Blue Star in San Antonio, and other notable venues.

 

Piper Bangs’s painting practice is grounded in an in-depth study of nineteenth-century academic oil painting techniques, Rococo decorative language, and the structures of light and shadow characteristic of Dutch Golden Age painting. While drawing on these historical methods, she recontextualizes them within a contemporary framework, integrating personal experience and current visual culture to pursue an ongoing exploration of the body, performance, and mechanisms of perception.

 

The stage functions as a key structural element in Bangs’s work. Curtains, lighting, textiles, and tilted spatial elements form a highly choreographed visual field, transforming painting from a mere representation of images into a reflection on the act of viewing itself. Through the metaphor of the stage, she examines the relationships between performance, the gaze, and power, while revealing the vulnerability and instability that gradually emerge beneath surface appearances.

 

Light holds a structural role in Bangs’s paintings. It is not simply employed to model volume or space, but operates as a perceptual force that organizes the composition, moving across surfaces and folds to create a sense of time poised between stillness and change. Through thick applications of paint and sculptural brushwork, Bangs’s images convey a suspended and unstable presence, positioning painting as an ongoing inquiry into perception, embodiment, and contemporary experience.