LAUREN QUIN

In 2025, Pace Gallery announced its representation of the artist and her first exhibition with the gallery, to be held in 2026 in Los Angeles, coinciding with Frieze.

Background

Raised in Atlanta, Quin’s earliest artistic explorations occurred with her self-taught father in their basement studio. She describes her foundation as essentially self-taught, although she later earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2015) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2019), leading to the evolution of her distinct painterly language. She now lives and works in Los Angeles.

Artistic Practice

Quin’s canvases are constructed through repeated, intersecting, and reconnected shapes—most notably her signature ‘tube’ motif. This motif acts as both a formal device and a visual rule to ‘bend or break’, giving rise to new optical and conceptual equations.

The Los Angeles based artist merges analog painting with techniques such as carving, etching, and monoprinting, often utilising unconventional tools like medical spoons and X-Acto knives. In addition to acrylic and oil paint, Quin’s process incorporates materials such as rabbit skin glue, which she often carves into. This approach yields deeply layered, tactile surfaces animated by polychrome energy, spidery incisions, and luminous color—achieving effects that feel technological but remain resolutely handmade.

Drawing acts as a compass rather than a plan in Quin’s practice: she navigates her compositions intuitively, welcoming the risks and rewards of chance. She has remarked, ‘I like these paintings to show every mistake, every decision, and never hide any of the sources’. Her swirling, colorful surfaces continually probe boundaries—between abstraction and figuration, body and landscape, sensuality and violence.

Selected Techniques and Themes

Primarily recognised as an abstract painter, Quin often alludes to figuration. Her work incorporates visual sources from research and observation, ranging from baroque mythological imagery (such as Ribera’s giant Tityus) to archetypes like spiders, bats, water, whale tails, leopard spots, and tiger stripes. These elements are not deployed for narrative but for their formal and symbolic resonance, evoking the flood of sensation and imagery that typifies digital existence. Her motifs are carved in relief—sometimes repeatedly—into layers of wet paint, contributing to a complex, stratified visual experience.

Lauren Quin’s Influences

Quin has cited admiration for painters such as Elizabeth Murray and Joan Mitchell. Her work is also informed by German abstraction, and artists like Fernand Léger, whose approach to mark-making and structure—particularly Léger’s ‘Tubism’—provided an important precedent for her techniques.

Lauren Quin Exhibitions

Lauren Quin’s artworks have featured in solo, and group shows internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include:

• My Hellmouth at the Nerman Museum of Art, Overland Park, KS (2023)
• Logopanic at 125 Newbury, New York (2024)
• Sagittal Fours at Pond Society, Shanghai (2022)
• Pulse Train Howl at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2022)
• Vocal Fry at Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco (2021)

Her paintings have appeared in group exhibitions such as Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection (2022), which was shown at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Museum Collections Holding Quin’s Work

Lauren Quin’s artworks are held in renowned museum collections, including

• Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami
• Columbus Museum of Art
• Dallas Museum of Art
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Nerman Museum of Art
• Pérez Art Museum, Miami
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
• Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

Recognition and Representation

Quin’s energetic approach to abstraction has rapidly gained institutional and critical attention. Her innovative mark-making and distinctive visual energy have established her as a leading figure among a new generation of abstract painters. In 2025, Pace Gallery announced representation of the artist, citing her mastery of dynamic movement and non-compositional forms that shift between concrete and ephemeral states. Quin was previously represented by BLUM, until it closed in 2025.

Lauren Quin FAQs

Ocula | 2025