ILIA

Lori Earley

ILIA

2025

Oil paint on board

30.48 x 40.64 cm / 12 x 16 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Lori Earley (b. Westchester County, New York) developed her painting style in near-total isolation through the late 1980s, teaching herself before any formal study — an early “vacuum” that let her arrive at a purely personal visual language. She went on to study at New York’s School of Visual Arts under Steven Assael, learning the technique of the old masters, and graduated as valedictorian with her BFA in the 1990s. Her stylized, elongated figures, praised for their rare, signature authenticity, echo Mannerist elements alongside the dramatic lighting of the Baroque, earning her solo exhibitions in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and London and recognition as a leading contemporary realist. After a rare genetic diagnosis forced a years-long hiatus and multiple surgeries, she returned to painting around 2026, by which time her distinctive style was already training a new generation of artists in classrooms worldwide.

ILIA pairs one of Earley’s androgynous figures with a hairless cat, set against a backdrop of dark, roiling clouds. The androgyne is wrapped in a strikingly rendered black fur coat, its long, luxuriant hair painted with the same old-master delicacy and precision that defines Earley’s practice — a technical virtuosity thrown into sharp relief by the cat beside it, whose bare skin carries not a single strand. That deliberate contrast, between an abundance of hair on the coat and its total absence on the animal, turns a small visual detail into a study in tactile opposites, painted with the same obsessive delicacy throughout.

To collect ILIA is to own a meticulously rendered oil on board from an American painter whose entirely self-taught technique, honed further under the old-master training of Steven Assael, has made her one of contemporary realism’s most distinctive voices — a small-format work that concentrates her elongated, Mannerist sensibility and Baroque light into one quietly witty, beautifully painted scene.