Kim West

Kim West is a Los Angeles–based painter whose practice spans studio painting, murals, ceramics, and site-responsive installation. Using gestural marks, layered translucence and icing-like opacities to build color-forward landscapes and botanical forms, West's work draws from personal and cultural memory, biota, ephemera, and historical artifacts. Ceramic elements are often incorporated as material interventions, extending the painted surface into dimensional space.

West has created large-scale public artworks throughout California, including Only One Way Through, a five-story mural commissioned by Hauser & Wirth in Downtown Los Angeles and described as “dreamlike” by The New York Times, and Kaleidoscope (How’d Ya Get to Be Happiness?), a 122,000-square-foot mural spanning multiple façades of the Huntington Beach Energy Project. Her mural work has been documented in exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, and her kinetic mural façade Inexhaustible Blooms (Ode to Bohemia No. 5) is installed at Google’s Mountain View campus.

West graduated from the Painting Department at the Rhode Island School of Design and has studied printmaking, photography, and literature at Smith College, Amherst College, and the Instituto Allende.