Charles Lahti Studios

About Charles Lahti

Artist, Print Maker

Charles Lahti has been a creative force within New York's art community for more than three decades. He first studied with Mary Abbott and Zigmunds Priede in Minnesota, then relocated to New York in 1977 to pursue a career in the visual arts, acting first as a printer at Styria Studios. From there he went on to work with some of the giants of postwar Ameri

can art, including Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and LeRoy Neiman. Throughout his career, Lahti has emphasized and gravitated towards collaboration and experimentation. Always captivated by the nexus of art and community, he was at the forefront of a number of nascent creative mediums, including performance, graffiti and multimedia art. His studios, first on the Lower East Side and then in Bushwick, have long been centers for learning and development for several generations of artists and printmakers. His works are regularly exhibited and collected internationally

My works are moments of time captured in paint, an index of moods and impressions. Points of light are revealed, fragments of figuration, a landscape of dream-impressions, free-flowing and chimerical. The viewer is invited to become enmeshed in these discontinuous experiences, to synthesize them through the lens of painting. Here are series of ‘yeses, nos and maybes’ that perhaps contain a notion or meaning just beyond our grasp and yet fully within it, an amplification of an internal dynamic that varies with each perceiver.

—CHARLES LAHTI