Boy Tears, 2026
Erin Wright
Albertz Benda
Erin Wright, a painter who also trained as an architect at UCLA, has a keen eye for domestic detail. The emerging Los Angeles artist makes hyperreal compositions of luxury interiors, painstakingly recreating the latch on a window, the chipped grout between tiles, and the track on a sliding door. Yet something is always awry: too bright, too sharp, too glitchy. Wright’s approach undermines viewers’ notions of homes curated to perfection.
For her new solo exhibition, “Fever Dream,” at Albertz Benda in Los Angeles, Wright has responded to the mid-century modern architecture and contemporary interior design of this unique exhibition space. The home gallery, which occupies the residence’s ground floor, is a collaboration between art collector Thorsten Albertz and design showroom Friedman Benda; they will unite their collections for intimate exhibitions staged just blocks from the famed Chateau Marmont. Albertz purchased the 1970s home around 2015 and subsequently remodeled it. Wright gives the space a second makeover as she replicates architectural elements and furniture in her compositions, then rearranges the environment as she places her canvases in different spots than the rooms they depict. Her paintings reproduce the gallery’s windows and glass doors to scale, turning the features into what she calls “architectural stickers.” This allows her to move the kitchen door into the dining room, or the front entrance over the stairwell.
Wright’s conceptual renovations run parallel to her own homebuilding experience in Los Angeles. Last December, her family moved into a house she designed, saving time and money with her insider knowledge of the industry. For those without such connections, she acknowledges that the dream homes portrayed in her paintings—and perhaps homeownership at large—are mere fantasy.
Slider, 2025
Erin Wright
Albertz Benda
Untitled, 2026
Erin Wright
Albertz Benda
Painting interior details
In the parallel world of “Fever Dream,” Slider (2025) relocates the living room’s sliding glass door to a wall that faces the street. Instead of portraying what would be expected on the other side of this wall—the curb, fencing, and occasional car—Wright depicts the back of a woman resting in a wide, white chair and a red-tailed hawk who cuts across the sunset. The real lounger, Wendell Castle’s Concrete Chair (white) (2010), also happens to be located in the home, except it’s placed outside on the back lawn. “This house becomes an architecture model where I get to play a little game,” Wright said.
This was a first for Wright. Her previous shows have taken place in white-cube galleries and fair booth settings, like last year’s exhibition, “Mapping The Middle,” at Anat Egbi’s Tribeca outpost, and her solo presentation at the Armory Show with Sow & Tailor in 2024. In those environments, she viewed her style more as a trompe l’oeil. In a home, she feels that her approach as a painter-turned-architect really shines.
The paintings duplicate many objects in Friedman Benda’s inventory, like a fuzzy white chair by Fernando Laposse, Carmen D'Apollonio’s head-shaped vase, and a foggy crystal stool by Faye Toogood. Wright’s paintings transform them from showroom pieces into well-loved furniture that’s fully integrated into someone’s home. Boy Tears (2026), for example, shows a fresh-cut bouquet of wild daisies stuffed into D'Apollonio’s bronze upturned head, and in Untitled (2026), a dachshund glances up at a tennis ball, a cookbook, and two cocktail glasses perched on Toogood’s stool, which has been repurposed into an end table.
L.A. Influences, from David Hockney to Pierre Koenig
Through these objects, Wright indicates glamorous lifestyles that can feel unobtainable in Los Angeles. She also finds inspiration in other sources rooted in fantasy: The dogs and color palettes were informed by David Hockney’s pastel-hued portraits of Los Angeles’s backyard pools. The tableaux come from imagining parties at the Stahl House, which can be spied from Albertz Benda’s front windows. The home, designed by Pierre Koenig in 1960 and officially known as Case Study House No. 22, recently went up for sale with an asking price of $25 million. Photographer Julius Shulman made the mid-century masterpiece famous when he captured two partygoers chatting in a glass room, which juts off the edge of the world while Hollywood glitters below.
Hyperreal style
Wright paints in a hyperrealistic style, which she achieves by masking out portions of the canvas and airbrushing with acrylic. Her flat surfaces help the artwork look more photographic. Additionally, Wright frequently uses a glazing technique she learned from her mentor, painter Nancy Cheairs, which boosts the dreamy colors and adds a slight sheen to the atmosphere, like an Instagram filter.
“Heavy gestural figuration has been really prominent in the market for the last decade or so, but I’m not interested in making it,” Wright said. She’s not impressed by abstraction, and she wants to dispel the feeling that an artwork is only valuable if it demonstrates artistic expression. “I’m trying to remove the hand as much as possible,” she added.
Armchair, 2025
Erin Wright
Albertz Benda
An architectural perspective
Wright pairs this realism with a playful approach to resolution and glitches, casting doubts on subjects’ aspirational lifestyles and moving her scenes into the uncanny valley. Up close, the breezy palms in French Door (2025) appear blurry, even though the steel doors that frame them are crisp; and the woodgrain floor in Armchair (2025) wiggles a bit, like pixels have been racked back and forth due to a rendering error. Wright often positions her subjects in an isometric perspective, a foreshortened angle used in architectural renderings that can’t be replicated in real life. In Good Boy (2025), for example, the angle causes one of Toogood’s blocky chairs to dwarf a small dachshund.
Wright’s subtle warping of perception encourages viewers to rethink the craftsmanship and promise embedded in domestic detail. Viewers begin to fully admire the artistry required to engineer a knob, handle, or bathroom tile, yet question their own desire for a life pulled from Instagram. By situating Wright’s work in a house, “Fever Dream” shows that a painting may offer an unusual view of the home it’s in. Before knocking down a wall to add a window, consider transforming the view with a canvas.
