Kaari Upson

Kaari Upson was born on April 22, 1970, in San Bernardino, California. She began her formal art education in 1998 at the New York Studio School and went on to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she earned a BFA in 2004 and an MFA in 2007.

Her signature body of work, The Larry Project, grew out of personal effects she discovered in a neighbor's fire-damaged house in San Bernardino and developed over more than a decade into paintings, sculptures, drawings, and video. She also became known for cast latex and urethane sculptures modeled on her mother's body and on rooms from her childhood home, work that folded the visceral into the domestic. She lived and worked primarily in Los Angeles.

Institutional recognition built steadily through solo presentations, including Hammer Projects at the Hammer Museum in 2007, Good Thing You Are Not Alone at the New Museum in 2017, and, in 2019, Go Back The Way You Came at Kunsthalle Basel and Door, Open, Shut at Kunstverein Hannover. That same year she participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times.

Upson was diagnosed with breast cancer and died of metastatic breast cancer on August 18, 2021, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. She was 51. Her death was confirmed by her galleries, and she was included posthumously in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022.

Institutions have consistently framed Upson as one of the defining artists of her Los Angeles generation. The New York Times, as cited in a CalArts memorial notice, described her as one of the most significant artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of her generation. Sprüth Magers and Kunsthalle Mannheim both describe her as one of the most prominent voices of her generation, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has called her one of the most significant and versatile American artists of her generation. Critical writing returns repeatedly to her use of casting, video, and appropriated personal material, especially The Larry Project and her body-cast sculptures of her mother, as a way of turning private obsession and family history into a broader meditation on the body, memory, and the American home. Her posthumous inclusion in the 2022 Venice Biennale and the traveling Dollhouse retrospective, organized by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art with Kunsthalle Mannheim and MASI Lugano, have reinforced this consensus in the years since her death.

Upson's auction market is thin, consistent with an artist whose primary market has run through galleries and museum acquisitions rather than frequent resale. The documented auction high is GBP 88,900 (about USD 120,800) for 168 (2013), sold at Phillips's Modern and Contemporary Art Day Sale in London on June 27, 2025, a price the auction house identified as a new record for the artist. Public sale results for Upson remain infrequent, so any single result should be read as a limited data point rather than a stable pricing trend.

Upson's market sits at an early stage relative to her institutional standing. Her museum presence, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and a string of recent European retrospectives, is far more developed than her recorded auction history, which so far consists of a small number of public sales. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication run through the estate's representing galleries, Sprüth Magers, White Cube, and Massimo De Carlo. Collectors should also expect continued institutional attention: the Dollhouse retrospective is scheduled to travel through Kunsthalle Mannheim and on to MASI Lugano into early 2027, which is likely to keep her critical profile active even as her auction supply stays limited.