Lauren Quin’s kaleidoscopic paintings rethink abstraction

Do vultures have a bad reputation? Plutarch thought so. “Vultures are the most virtuous birds,” he wrote. “They don’t even attack the smallest living creature.” It could be argued that artists, by nature, are also vultures, consuming the carrion of human experience and spitting it out into the world for further examination.

The Los Angeles-based painter Lauren Quin has been interested in vultures for years. Although her densely layered abstractions are certainly fodder for the culture vultures of the international art world (at 30, she already has several works in the public collections of international museums, including the Hirshhorn, MOCA Los Angeles and the Walker Art Center), she is more intrigued by how her paintings might themselves be scavengers. This was especially true as she created new work for “Salon Real,” her second solo exhibition with Blum and Poewhich opened on July 5 at the gallery’s Tokyo outpost.

“I love that these paintings show every mistake, every decision, and never hide any of the sources,” said Quin, wearing black denim shorts and black sneakers, at her cavernous new studio complex in Culver City , where visitors enter through a lush landscape. tropical garden. These sources can be found in the various works of art scattered throughout this maze of communicating rooms, such as Jose de Ribera17th-century Baroque rendering of the gigantic Greek god Titus lying bound in Hades (a punishment for attempting to rape Leto). The vultures feed on his liver which regenerates over and over again, so he is tortured in perpetuity.

For several years the image of this painting from 1632, entitled Tityus, floated through Quin’s vast archive, which is full of the tropes she returns to: spiders, vibrating cymbals, hands holding winged bats or water, whale tails, tiger stripes and spots leopard. She uses them as larger formal structures or repeatedly carved reliefs (with a spoon or knife) in her wet “tubes” of paint: snaking oil-pointed fans that create an architecture of lines across the Web.

This approach is inspired by a Fernand Léger work she discovered at the Yale University Art Gallery as an MFA student. “Léger and other artists in that orbit had a way of achieving a unified brand that had consistent weight,” Quin said. “As a student, I noticed this mark and started playing with it.” Léger’s style was often known as Tubism rather than Cubism.

Quin then adds the aforementioned sculptures and finishes with a series of monotype prints, made from the reverse side of the canvas, which create a skin of oily, shadowed ink over its grainy, cellular, sometimes oracular surfaces.

“One of the challenges Quin finds most provocative is how to achieve movement in a static form through the interaction of colors,” wrote Fanny Singer in an essay in the artist’s recently published monograph, My mouth from hell, which accompanied his solo debut at the museum of the same name at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year. “I think Quin would embrace the notion of color as illusion, the sleight-of-hand quality involved in the act of painting when nothing is stable.”

Nothing is, or has been, stable in Quin’s paintings since she graduated from the Yale School of Art in 2019 (following a residency at Skowhegan and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago ). After a short stay in New York, Quin returned to Los Angeles, where she was born (although she grew up in Atlanta with parents who worked in advertising). After returning, she said, her father, a “Sunday painter,” briefly served as Quin’s “unpaid intern.”

His solo debut took place in 2019, at East Hollywood Fine Art. To demonstrate the evolution of his work, Quin collected a 60 x 48 inch painting titled Clutch for Lotto (2019), after a Lorenzo Lotto paint. In this landscape-oriented painting, the palette is soft, the gestures open, and the tubes – some brown and yellow, others pink and blue – are used almost as framing devices or guides that lead the viewer to different points entry. “I was learning how to make the paintings that way, so they were operating in those areas,” she said.

Although this work was modest in size, Quin’s latest efforts are extremely ambitious in approach and scale. Networks of tubes trace the connective tissues that link form, color and gesture. Patterns are everywhere, from moiré to animal skin. In a work still in progress, The future of milk, inverted tiger stripes appear like sperm running toward an egg-shaped cymbal, with jets of white ink suggesting sexual release. “One of my dealers came in and she asked me, ‘Are you pregnant?’ » Quin said with a laugh. “But I was just taking back the negative space of the stripes.”

In another work in progress depicting what appears to be a bioluminescent aquatic scene, with its sea of ​​deep cerulean pigment, Quin plays with what she calls a “blue warmth.” Here, the shade functions as a “swallow color,” she said.

“I’ve always had sort of a love affair with colors, like vermillion or Indian yellow, which I think can hold paint,” Quin said. “I try to keep this picture as dark as possible.”

For the new exhibition, the works were scaled down to fit the Tokyo gallery’s smaller space. In response, Quin produced his first suite of vertically oriented paintings in six years, and his first diptych, The gush (2023). The painting, filled with flame-like voids and magenta, “taught me how to circulate a gesture between an indeterminate space, because the two can separate or stay together,” Quin said. “I also feel like printing has become very gestural.” This is especially true in painting Solar hole (2023), which evokes the feeling of being blinded by the sun with black and white tubes riding kaleidoscopic entropy.

Quin also experimented with larger tube brands, as shown in a painting titled Kettle (2023) (a reference to how vultures gather). A similar expression of ink glitch is apparent in one of his largest paintings, a 15-foot-long piece titled Modesty foam (2021), which is based on the image of a spider in the palm of a hand.

“There is a way in which a word or a language can have a range of meanings and I’m really interested in that concept in terms of image,” Quin said. “What happens is I have a painting lying around and it becomes what I think of for the next painting, it’s the inspiration for this one. So there’s a lot of repetition of these symbols until they dissolve.

If Quin’s trajectory and approach are often compared to those of Joanne Mitchell And Elizabeth Murrayboth of whom she considers personal icons of painting, she hopes to follow a more disruptive path in her own career: she cites German abstract painters Albert Oehlen And Charline von Heyl as models in this regard.