Enigmatic artist and musician Llyn Foulkes passed away on Thursday, November 20, at his home in Los Angeles. The news was confirmed by his daughter, Jenny Foulkes, who noted that earlier reports misstated the date of his death. He was 91 years old.
Across his seven-decade career, Foulkes created paintings, assemblage pieces, constructions, and music that mine American history, cartoons, politics, and his own autobiography in a diverse oeuvre, mixing dark humor and scathing critique with a tactile vitality. He was a mercurial artist, never wanting to be pinned down with one style, though he was perhaps best known for his “Bloody Head” paintings, portraits whose subjects looked as if their heads had been split open, flayed, or disfigured with collaged elements.
“Llyn Foulkes was a quintessential Los Angeles artist,” Ali Subotnick, who curated a 2013 Foulkes retrospective at the Hammer Museum, told Hyperallergic. “Through his fiercely original paintings and mixed-media tableaux, he satirized icons of popular culture, critiqued the commodification of American life, and illustrated the violence and contradictions embedded in our national identity.”
Foulkes was born in Yakima, Washington, on November 17, 1934. He moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts). His early work included monochrome landscapes of Southern California rock formations and Pop art-adjacent postcard paintings.
Shortly after earning his bachelor’s degree, Foulkes secured a solo show at the storied Ferus Gallery in 1961, followed by an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) one year later. In 1964, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired his work, the first institution to do so.
Despite these early successes, Foulkes’s career was defined by a series of ups and downs, due in part to his rejection of a consistent style.
“Llyn continued to reinvent himself, continually changing paths conceptually, aesthetically, and materially,” said Adam Miller, co-founder of The Pit, an artist-run space that held Foulkes’s final show earlier this year.
In the 1980s, Foulkes began to feature Mickey Mouse in his work, targeting the character as a symbol of corporate banality and brainwashing. In “The Corporate Kiss” (2001), Foulkes grimaces as the cartoon rodent leans in to kiss his cheek. Holding a pistol, he settles the score in “Deliverance” (2007), as Mickey lies on the ground, smoke billowing from a hole in his chest.
These were followed by captivating relief works made of carved wood, fabric, and, in one instance, a mummified cat, that portrayed a kind of bucolic mid-century Americana and the rot that lay just beneath the surface. “Pop” (1985–90), a 10-foot-long mixed-media assemblage with music, depicts a dysfunctional domestic scene: A bug-eyed father (resembling Foulkes) stares at the television, comforted by a wife or daughter, as their walkman-wearing son enters, his notebook proclaiming: “I will be a good American.”
Alongside his visual art career, Foulkes was an avid drummer, appearing with his Rubber Band on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1974. In 1979, he debuted his one-man band, a contraption of horns, bells, and drums titled “The Machine” that he continued to perform with for decades.
Foulkes was defined by his uncompromising vision, a quality that often put him at odds with members of the mainstream art world. “He was a very genuine person, to a fault,” Jenny Foulkes told Hyperallergic. “Either you loved him or hated him. No one felt neutral.”
Curator Paul Schimmel put it another way: “He preferred to shoot himself in the foot than to be a pawn of the art world.” Schimmel included Foulkes in the seminal 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), which charted artistic possibilities of the coming decade. Nearly two decades later, he invited Foulkes to show work in Under the Big Black Sun in 2011, which in turn looked back on California art in the 1970s, also at MOCA.
“That was a little like his career,” Schimmel said. “It’s brilliant, original, ass-backwards, and upside-down.”
Foulkes yearned for the recognition he thought he deserved, but refused to “play the game,” according to The Dark Bob, an artist who knew Foulkes for 50 years. “He had no capacity for small talk and no interest in charming the bourgeois elitists in the art world’s upper echelon,” he said.
In the 2013 documentary Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, the artist lamented, “In LA, they don’t like me here. Artists do, but critics don’t, even though everything I’ve done has been about Los Angeles. In my own town I feel disregarded.”
That would change with his Hammer Museum retrospective that same year, which traveled to the New Museum in New York and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany, kicking off a period of renewed interest in his work.
Solo shows at David Zwirner in New York, Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles and Berlin, and Gagosian in Beverly Hills would follow, though Foulkes never settled with these blue-chip galleries.
“He is the most visceral, gutsy, confrontational and outspoken artist I have, or will ever know,” said Craig Krull, whose namesake gallery held one of the artist’s last shows in 2024. “In these outrageous times, I often wonder why there are not more artists like Llyn Foulkes.”
