Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Mimi Lauter. Lauter's technique employs intricate layers of oil and soft pastel on large scale paper. Her unique surfaces seem tapestry-like in their complex tactile quality. Filled with texture, etched passages, and detail, her abstracted metaphoric marks pulsate with color and fascinate the viewer. Lauter's iconoclastic practice looks to European modernist painters, such as Bonnard, Redon, and Vuillard as influences for her jewel-like palette.
In this new body of work, Lauter continues to explore rich hues through natural landscapes and domestic scenes. Interior settings suggest a desire to control nature, but the complex interplay of patterns, imagery and color proves the wild landscape cannot be harnessed. Abstracted birds and angels inhabit her imaginary narratives in a lush world of exploding ochre, deep sapphire and vivid claret that Lauter describes as creating the "personality of each work...akin to knowing someone. The narrative tells us what we are looking at; the color tells us who we are looking at." The viewer's experience alternates between an abstracted narrative and one of physicality, color sensation, and intense mark making.
In this body of work, the chaos of a wave breaking the horizon line crashes through images of dining tables, still lives, and landscapes. As Lauter observes: "The wave is something inevitable, but still a disruption, trying to swallow itself, a violent break on a peaceful horizon. I thought I would try to confine a wave in a vase, a well, or some sort of vessel. Instead of containing the wave, I ended up with explosions, bouquets, and even trees. Above the wave, each piece has a perfect, deliberately patterned arch in the sky, holding onto the curve. These pieces are about order and chaos and what happens within the wave."
Mimi Lauter was born in San Francisco in 1982. She received her BA at University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. Her work has recently been acquired by the Hammer Museum, and Lauter has been featured in Made in LA, the museum's Los Angeles biennial. She has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Riverside Museum, Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, The Room Gallery,UC Irvine, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Lauter has been the recipient of the Medici Scholarship Award (2008), The Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhard Foundation award (2005) and the Elain Krown Klein Scholarship Award (2004).
For information about the exhibition or the gallery, please contact Alisun Woolery at 323.933.9911 or [email protected].
