Raised in Southern California, Sandow Birk makes large-scale oil paintings that address, in the artist's words, "the crux of 'Los Angelesness', its history as a major world city of our times, and its evolving and unique 'Angeleno' culture springing from the mix of the diverse communities living within the city." To this end his paintings draw liberally from the aesthetics of 17th- and 18th-century history painting. In a breakthrough series from the mid to late 1990s, Birk imagined a fictional war between Northern and Southern California for control of the state. This ambitious series of paintings reached its culmination in a sprawling exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum in 2000 that featured all of the works in the series, complete with fictional wall texts and an audio guide. More recently, Birk has turned his attention to the Los Angeles prison system in his "Prisonation" series, which confronts the paradisical myths perpetuated by the California landscape tradition with the harsh realities of the California penal system, which incarcerates more than one and a half million people. His latest project is a rewriting and illustrating of Dante's Inferno set in contemporary urban Los Angeles. Birk received his BFA from Otis Art Institute in 1988 and has studied at the Bath Academy of Art, England, and the American College in Paris.

President Bush Visiting the Riots in Los Angeles, 1994
Oil and acrylic on canvas; 53x68 in