Lauren Luloff “Pineapples and Teapots”
The Hole
This event has ended.
The Hole presents a solo exhibition by Lauren Luloff in Gallery 3 this February entitled Pineapples and Teapots. The show will include new large canvases, small paintings and draped works that hang from the ceiling. After recent impressive group shows in NYC and abroad, this solo project by Luloff looks in depth at her recent works across scale and medium.
The artworks in this exhibition have multiple strata; many begin with hand-painted fabrics where Luloff creates textures and colors using bleach on domestic fabrics to paint a sort of pan-international imagery that references many traditional designs. The artist worked in a tiny village in Gujarat India twice over two years studying traditional block printing. These patterns become her working material as she collages forms onto canvas with rabbit glue, often including oil painted components or using tulle to create see through windows in the works. Occasionally the artists paints from life with the bleach, from portraits of friends to household objects; even the occasional plein-air landscape appear in the photogram-like bleach lines. The transparent elements in the composition make the works look like laminations and the natural tones and puckering of the rabbit glue suggest the taut hide of a drum or the slick adhesion of clothes caught in a downpour.
Her subject matter ranges from still life to personified abstraction, where shapes take on a personality as they move on the surface and interact with other collage elements. As pineapples are the international symbol of hospitality, and tea perhaps the un-official domestic one, the paintings indeed suggest a cozy comfort in their mellowed earth tones and welcoming playfulness. The larger works suspended in the gallery were painted outdoors in Maine and depict lazy sailboats gliding by or the reliable rotation of an old mill.
The small paintings in the exhibition are less sketches and more pared-down or distilled and pungent lozenges of the larger works. In these pieces the materials used in the works come to the fore, and autonomously evoke the landscapes, vignettes or still lives the artist makes her subjects. Their more minimal compositions and more sparse tonal gradations look like tiny glazed windows onto new country.
The paintings evoke the hotly argued issues surrounding the “P and D” movement in the late 70s where neo-conceptualism, a nascent globalism and feminist art collided in a movement that sought to liberate decoration and ornament from their inferior position and raise the status of the domestic arts to the realm of fine art. These paintings benefit from those past conceptual struggles in art by not having to fight them all over again, and instead can focus on expanding the movement’s sort of “anti-beauty” without having to focus on questioning notions of taste. These works are improvisational and unafraid to make “mistakes” as each work pursues its own idiosyncratic personality.
Lauren Luloff lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Since receiving her M.F.A. at Bard in 2010, she has shown her work at numerous venues, including Galerie Lelong, Thomas Erben, Tanya Bonakdar, and the Queens Museum of Art. Recent solo shows include Recent Paintings, at Showroom, Gowanus (2013-14), Daily Companions at Cooper Cole Toronto (2013); an exhibition of small works at Horton Gallery, New York (2012); and Dark Interiors and Bright Landscapes at Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY (2012). Her work has received mention in T Magazine, the New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, The Huffington Post, Gallerist NY, and the Village Voice.
[Image: Lauren Luloff “Domestic Tranquility” (2012) oil, bleached bedsheets and fabric on muslin; 74 x 59 inches]
Media
Schedule
from February 07, 2014 to March 01, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-02-07 from 18:00 to 21:00