It’s always golden hour in Robert Ginder’s Southern California. Shadows are long, lawns and topiary are immaculately maintained, and palm trees abound.
Golden Estates: The House Paintings of Robert Ginder (2025, Hat & Beard Press) features fifty works by the titular artist, each a portrait of a single-family home, either straight on or from a slight oblique angle, as if viewed from a passing car. The structures are modest one-story Spanish and Colonial Revival–style bungalows of the type that are ubiquitous throughout many Southland neighborhoods, characterized by stucco walls and red tile roofs. Such houses are so prevalent in parts of Los Angeles that they can appear rather unremarkable, but Ginder’s “variations” suggest otherwise.
Here, the humble abode becomes an icon, complete with gilded halo. In every case, the stucco bungalow is backgrounded by an aureate sky, rendered in gold leaf on an arched wood panel, evoking both Southern California’s famed quality of light and the magnificence of Byzantium on a single luminous surface. (It’s worth noting that one of the few installation images that appear in Golden Estates depicts Ginder’s first house painting, Casa [1984], hung in the icon room at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego.)
Ginder’s typological study recalls the work of other serial documentarians of SoCal’s residential landscape, such as John Divola, Judy Fiskin, Charles Jencks, Catherine Opie, and Ed Ruscha, whose Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) Ginder sites as an influence. Indeed, flipping through page after page has the effect of driving through a neighborhood, block by block.
Instead of taking a systematic documentary style approach, however, Ginder seems most concerned with capturing the splendor of late afternoon light in the landscapes of his youth, hopping around various residential enclaves in Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties to construct the tract of his daydreams. This is suggested by the titles of the paintings—some are associative and poetic (Butter [2001], Blue Heaven [1993], and Flourishing [2001]), while others point to a particular location (Granada Near 4th [1998] and Peace at 348 [2000]) or time (Wed. 7:00 [1989]). An interview with Vanity Fair writer Mark Rozzo provides insight into Ginder’s background—growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s— and nostalgic reflections on the music, car, surf, and art scenes, to which he was drawn.
Yet, there’s an uneasy tension to Ginder’s bungalow heaven, an uncanny stillness. While the sidewalks are devoid of people, it’s clear these houses have been lived in, as evidenced by the stray soccer ball, newspaper, or snowman decoration on the lawn; a flyer tucked into the security gate at the front door; an overflowing trash can; a glowing lamp glimpsed through curtains. What goes on behind the bougainvillea and stucco walls? What fate awaits the city just out of frame? With a shift in the wind, Ginder’s flaxen skies can shade into the otherworldly orange of an urban inferno. Golden Estates captures Los Angeles in suspension, perpetually on edge, waiting.