Lauren Quin approaches the act of painting as a process of ongoing inquiry. Her paintings are at once radically intuitive and deeply considered, simultaneously sedimentary and archaeological. Composed from dynamic, intensely chromatic forms, they challenge our understanding of abstraction while exploring the mutability of language and symbol.Quin’s practice is rooted in an evolving archive of imagery, which takes shape throughout her drawings, prints, and carvings, providing seeds for her painterly abstractions. These images operate in multiple registers and are sometimes printed onto the surface of the canvas or carved back into it through layers of wet paint. Quin also transfers select images onto the verso of her canvases, where they act as internal coordinates as she works. In this way, her archive provides a system of visual anchoring, linking individual paintings and allowing earlier studies to inform subsequent inquiries.Quin’s works accumulate as much through subtraction as through addition. She builds her compositions in successive layers, interrupting them with excavations of intricate linear networks of carved paint, which bloom across the picture plane. Using and reusing a core repertoire of idiosyncratic gestures and techniques—including “carving” as well as monoprinting drawings directly onto the surface of the painting—Quin orchestrates scintillating atmospheres alive with movement and depth.Across Quin’s paintings, remnants of previous forms drift, emerge, and recede, creating oscillating and complex visual fields. The paintings resist finality, hovering in a state of visual flux, where images constantly coalesce and dissolve. Quin suspends these images between abstraction and objectivity—allowing her forms to hold multiple references at once. The abstract “tube”-like marks that proliferate in many of her paintings sometimes appear like tunnels or pathways, and at other times like furrows or mouths. Throughout Quin’s works, references to the body—and its thresholds between interior and exterior space—act as a touchstone.
