Spelled as it Sounds: Ideas that form a painting process and trajectory

In this Open Practice Committee talk, exhibiting artist Lauren Quin discusses the themes, influences, and evolution of her paintings’ singular visual vocabulary.

In a process combining painting, etching, and monoprinting, layered paintings by Lauren Quin are pushed to points of visual vibration. In close relation to sonic sensations, tangles of electric biomorphic architectures echo across canvases. Within snaking tube forms, wet paint is removed in patterns to form connective vibrating tissues of radiating lines revealing still more ribbons of color underneath. Inverting the tubes, the works' long stalks are revealed to be searching wet sockets; holes, portals, tunnels, and passageways.

Lauren Quin is an artist living and works in Los Angeles. Quin graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Quin's premiere solo museum exhibition, My Hellmouth, opened this year at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and in tandem, NMOCA will release the artist’s first comprehensive monographic publication. Her work is represented in numerous public collections including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Quin’s painting Godwink is on view at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art in the exhibition Calling on the Past: Selections from the Collection (through February 4, 2023).

FREE, open to all.

Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts.

Image: Lauren Quin, Godwink (detail), 2022, Oil on canvas. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Gift of Antonio Valverde, 2023.1. Photo by Jason Smith.