Lauren Quin
Marking her first solo show with Pace since joining the gallery in 2025, this body of work foregrounds a decisive and self-imposed rupture in Quin’s practice since her 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury in New York. In these new paintings, Quin has turned from an “overdose” of chromatic intensity toward what she describes as a “detox of color.” Through this reduction, Quin short-circuits the associative, emotional, and referential powers of color.
Formally, Quin’s compositions are assemblages, stitched together from previous bodies of work, temporally fragmented and sutured. In each painting, she collages motifs, symbols, and spatial logics into new unities held taut between stability and collapse. The result is a kind of internal yet inscrutable language that emerges across her oeuvre, an esoteric mode of meaning-making that feels almost mystical. Quin calls this “superstitious abstraction,” an approach guided by the search for moments of synchronicity and serendipity, which then suggest the next step in the chain of formal invention.
Titled Eyelets of Alkaline, the exhibition will remain on view through March 28 and coincide with the 2026 edition of Frieze Los Angeles. It will also be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Pace Publishing—available here—featuring a new text by the poet, playwright, and essayist Ariana Reines.
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.
Quin received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015) before attending Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut, where she received her MFA (2019). In 2017, she held a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Vocal Fry, Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco (2021); Pulse Train Howl, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2022); Sagittal Fours, Pond Society, Shanghai (2022); My Hellmouth, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas (2023); and Logopanic, 125 Newbury, New York (2024). Her work is held in public collections worldwide, including those of the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Long Museum, Shanghai; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, among others. Quin lives and works in Los Angeles.
Lauren Quin, Lowing, 2024, oil on canvas, 86" × 71" (218.4 cm × 180.3 cm). Photo: Marten Elder © Lauren Quin