Gallery Blum & Poe is pleased to present Salon Real, artist Lauren Quin's debut in Japan.

Salon Real is the opening sequence to a series of knots. One inferred meaning of this phrase connotes the original Paris Salons and the reactionary Salon d'Automne. These traditional exhibition forums united and established a throughline for the canonical discourse forged by generations of artists, Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp among them, whose influences have elliptically swayed pictures composed by Quin. Self-aware as models for visual indulgence, the paintings—like the exhibition's title—scavenge, and layer symbols, forms, and gestures from throughout art history.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Artist Lauren Quin ( b. 1992) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Quin, who grew up in Atlanta, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Yale School of Art. And yet, she insists that no one has ever taught her how to paint. “I always dodged intro classes,” she says. “The medium of paint, how it works chemically—I had to learn it the hard way.” The way she tells it, her most formal (and formative) instruction came from her father, who had no training. “He just worked in the basement, alongside me,” she recalls. It was there that he passed on the very basics, like how to hold a brush.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including her first US museum show My Hellmouth, Nerman Museum of Art, Overland Park, KS (2023); Sagittal Fours, Pond Society, Shanghai, China (2022); Pulse Train Howl, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2022), and group exhibitions such as Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami's Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art.

Drawing the eye in with bright colors Quin's abstract paintings exist at the juncture of the deeply personal and the universal, The artist is dealing in modes of communication both micro and macro, internal and external, to achieve her keenly allusive repertoire of imagery and forms of mark-making. The artist deploys a host of moments and symbols as structural devices within each work, making archetypes out of figures that she collects and expands upon through a sketching practice. Her paintings are built from a shape that is repeated and overlapped. This layering process creates a multitude of compositional center points as well as other forms that appear in the residual spaces. Each painting is also topped with motifs derived from her own drawing archive, which she transfers onto the canvas with a meticulously honed mono-printing technique.

Cover photo Loupe, 2022

© Lauren Quin. Courtesy the artist, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo, and Friends Indeed Gallery. Photo: Joshua Schaedel.