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Lot Essay
Lauren Quin’s Creak (2021) is a vibrant symphony of form, colour and line, a rhapsodic composition of whirls and whorls. The emerging Los Angeles-based artist has won plaudits for her frenetic, turbulent style and densely textured canvases. Creak, which belongs to a significant series of works Quin created in 2021, exemplifies these qualities. Spanning over two metres, it features a wriggling maroon form in surging brushstrokes, resembling tentacles or entrails, glowing with a glossy white light. An aurora-like field of violet and blue can be glimpsed in the background. Other shades intersect with it, in warm, pale and livid blue, fiery red and vivid yellow. Scored through the paint is an intricate, writhing network of sgraffito lines, redolent of a fingerprint’s ridges or the rings of a tree. They glow with yellow, purple and blue, like miniature tubes of neon. The scene is further enhanced with streaks and splatters in lime green, fizzing across the canvas like fireworks.
Since concluding her studies in 2019, Quin has rapidly become one of the United States’ most acclaimed young artists, with a brace of solo and group gallery exhibitions and institutional shows at the Institute of Contemporary Miami and the X Museum, Beijing. Quin did not always plan to become a painter. She initially wanted to become an art therapist, helping others through practice. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she worked in a gallery in Los Angeles. An unexpected offer of residency at Maine’s intensive Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture summer school followed by a place on the prestigious Yale MFA programme changed everything. Here Quin found her vocation. She was particularly inspired by a work from the Cubist painter Fernand Léger in Yale’s collection. As she explains, ‘I looked at Léger’s paintings as antithetical to mine in the way that they were organised, and I wanted to make something with that organisational tool’ (L. Quin, quoted in S. Eckardt, ‘In the Studio with Lauren Quin, the Painter Doing Abstraction Her Own Way’, W Magazine, 8 July 2021).
Quin soon developed a distinctive and complex technique. She begins by painting a crosshatched base of colour, before adding her characteristic sweeping worm-like cylinders. She places a line drawing above this, which she layers and distorts. Afterwards, she uses tools such as knives and spoons to create grooves, effectively excavating her own painting, and finally presses the almost-finished canvas onto a pane of glass covered with wet pigment, leaving stained impressions in a process comparable to monoprinting. The resultant works are unmistakably a product of human ingenuity, joining a lineage of gestural abstract expressionists such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. Their attention to layering and colour recalls the explosive abstracts of Gerhard Richter. Yet they are also eerily reminiscent of overlaid digital images, reflecting the surfaces of our screen-obsessed age. Creak displays this fascinating confluence in full flourish.
Since concluding her studies in 2019, Quin has rapidly become one of the United States’ most acclaimed young artists, with a brace of solo and group gallery exhibitions and institutional shows at the Institute of Contemporary Miami and the X Museum, Beijing. Quin did not always plan to become a painter. She initially wanted to become an art therapist, helping others through practice. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she worked in a gallery in Los Angeles. An unexpected offer of residency at Maine’s intensive Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture summer school followed by a place on the prestigious Yale MFA programme changed everything. Here Quin found her vocation. She was particularly inspired by a work from the Cubist painter Fernand Léger in Yale’s collection. As she explains, ‘I looked at Léger’s paintings as antithetical to mine in the way that they were organised, and I wanted to make something with that organisational tool’ (L. Quin, quoted in S. Eckardt, ‘In the Studio with Lauren Quin, the Painter Doing Abstraction Her Own Way’, W Magazine, 8 July 2021).
Quin soon developed a distinctive and complex technique. She begins by painting a crosshatched base of colour, before adding her characteristic sweeping worm-like cylinders. She places a line drawing above this, which she layers and distorts. Afterwards, she uses tools such as knives and spoons to create grooves, effectively excavating her own painting, and finally presses the almost-finished canvas onto a pane of glass covered with wet pigment, leaving stained impressions in a process comparable to monoprinting. The resultant works are unmistakably a product of human ingenuity, joining a lineage of gestural abstract expressionists such as Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell. Their attention to layering and colour recalls the explosive abstracts of Gerhard Richter. Yet they are also eerily reminiscent of overlaid digital images, reflecting the surfaces of our screen-obsessed age. Creak displays this fascinating confluence in full flourish.