Lari Pittman is inspired by advertisements, abstraction, surrealism, Victorian silhouettes, and Social Realist murals. He thinks color is political and says of his paintings, cacophonous crazy quilts that bind ugliness to beauty and chaos to calm, “I want to offer a painting that somehow the viewer has to stand in front of it and almost not believe it.” This major retrospective puts 80 works of singular vision in front of the viewer. —E.C.