Kelly Reemsten’s Fool’s Gold
The artist’s gleaming suite of new oil paintings and hand-embellished screenprints shine at Albertz Benda in Los Angeles
Rays of afternoon sun glow over a clothing rack along the far wall of Kelly Reemsten’s downtown Los Angeles studio. From Carolina Herrera to Dior and YSL, the collection of candy colors, black-and-white stripes and graphic prints have been featured over the years in Reemsten’s iconic paintings. Many of the dresses have classic silhouettes with luxe fabrics, fitted waists and full skirts. And quite noticeably in the middle, several gold lamé and sequined garments that star in the artist’s newest collection, “Fool’s Gold,” now on view at Albertz Benda in Los Angeles.
“It’s all gold dresses, with the exception of one pink,” says Reemsten. “The show is about reflecting.” When asked about finding the clothing for her shows throughout the years, she says “they come from everywhere. It is kind of an archive—this is about half of it. Each time I have gotten rid of a dress I have seriously regretted it, so now I keep everything.” Reemsten pulls out a favorite Carolina Herrera and a Dior. Then she picks up a sheer dress with a large voluminous silhouette. “This is Molly Goddard!”
Reemsten also fills her studio space with momentoes, ephemera, small painting studies, books and supplies. Her many collections also include mid-century furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, Herman Miller and Eero Saarinen. She piles colorful oil paints into mounds so artfully, that they appear to be a sculpture exhibit in the works. An orange Vespa is parked near large white cabinets filled with her tool collection. Vintage printing presses sit ready for their next project. She began to explore printmaking in the 1990s, studying etching and screenprinting.
Originally from Flint, Michigan and currently based in Los Angeles and London, Reemsten has become known for her vivid paintings of women in gorgeous frocks carrying axes, chainsaws, hedge shears and gardening hoses rendered in oil paint with giant brush strokes. Reemsten’s background in studying fashion led to not only a lifelong interest in style, but serves as an inspiration for a majority of the subjects she paints.
After Reemsten’s last show that explored the theme of focus, she started thinking about how to shake things up. “I wanted to do something so shiny to distract people from the grim reality out there,” she says. “I have a couple of takes on gold, especially fool’s gold, because I do think the American dream is a big pot of fool’s gold.” Reemsten also likens fool’s gold to meanness: “Then I started thinking about the golden rule, and really the bottom line is just treat people how you want to be treated,” she adds. “So that’s where I stand with fool’s gold now, and the fool part being social media, because people can be so mean on social media, and if that person was in your presence, you wouldn’t be as mean.”
“My thought was, I wanted to be so shiny that it hurts to look at it,” says Reemsten. She began to place the dresses in the studio and started to arrange some panels of orange, green, and pink in the space. “But then I got all these gold dresses in the room, and I saw how everything was reflecting and I started thinking about reflection. There’s so many things about reflection, like how you can reflect on somebody. When you reflect on something, you’re thinking about something.” She began to capture how the colors in the room were reflecting on the dresses.
The idea that attracted Reemsten to gold dresses originated when she saw Katy Perry wearing a gown that looked like it was made from gold foil. Perry wore this bold look for King Charles’ Coronation Concert, a Vivienne Westwood design based on a bridal gown from the designer’s 2006 Gold Label collection.
“It was reflecting so much in the stadium and wherever she was on stage. I thought, ‘Wow, look at that! That looks amazing!’” says Reemsten. “So that was the dress that sort of sparked it. And then I started looking at who else is making gold dresses, or who else has made gold dresses?”
As her ideas begin to form, Reemsten invites friends over to model the dresses and stages photos with different tools. She may take a few thousand images to look through later to decide which variations to paint. She narrows down the images to a series of five to ten to paint, which she feels will be a good composition that depicts the theme. She describes the process as instinctual.
Along the way she listens to audio books, mostly memoirs and biographies by musicians, from Johnny Marr and Alex James to Blur and Elvis Costello. “Keith Richards wrote one of the best memoirs ever,” she says.
For the opening night of “Fool’s Gold,” Reemsten asked her guests to get glam in their most lavish of golden hues. She wore one of the dresses from her collection with a plan to also change into the one with the pink square paillettes.
The show features hand-embellished screen prints and the debut of large silk scarves in a branded orange polka dot box. One scarf depicts one of Reemsten’s most recognizable paintings, “Pattern Behavior,” a composition of a woman in a geometric black-and-white striped print holding a shovel in front of a black and white wall featuring the same optical striped pattern. Another one of Reemsten’s paintings of a woman in a black-and-white dress recently made the news when artist David Salle opened his AI-generated show “My Frankenstein” with one work so prominently featuring Reemsten’s painting that it caused a heated debate about whether his AI experiment was just outright copying and plagiarism.
For now, Reemsten is focusing on new works and upcoming shows, enjoying the gleaming golden world she has created, celebrating reflection on its many applications in our lives and is excited about her new Dropshop Curated by Phillips series that launched 7 April.
“Fool’s Gold” is on view by appointment at Albertz Benda Los Angeles until 16 May, 2026.
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