MIMI LAUTER

Mimi Lauter’s emotionally charged and vividly coloured universe is made up predominantly of oil and soft pastels on paper as well as oil on linen. While on the surface Lauter’s compositions and colors are very much inspired by the natural world around her, in particular by her garden which she often refers to as her ‘ongoing, constantly changing epic mural,’ the artist uses this as a springboard for a deeper reflection on painting as a theatrical space in which she can present imagery and form.

Lauter is often attracted to the framing of a work, almost like curtains for a stage, or an architectural structure. Similar to theatre, Lauter discusses painting as something that is artificial and yet simultaneously a representation of the world around us and within. The visceral forms that surge from her deeply saturated works are comprised of expansive fields of layered colours and swirling textures assembling abstracted narratives. Lauter builds imagery through diverse sources of mythology, literature, a European history of painting and her personal memory and dreams.

Somewhere between landscape and still-life, her works explore the inherent tension between these two historically charged styles of painting. For Lauter, the theatrical structure of a still-life painting is often a metaphor for mortality while a landscape represents the potential of life- something she realised while meandering through the landscape of her own garden in search of new growth and thinking about the path or composition that guides a viewer through landscape painting. Similar to her approach of suspending the viewer between these two opposing structures of painting, she employs this strategy in her representation of the external and the internal, the epic and the personal, the expansive and the most intimate detail.

In 2012, Lauter was included in the first Los Angeles Biennial Made in L.A. 2012 organised by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART. In 2021, Lauter will participate in Prospect.5 New Orleans, LA. Lauter received her B.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. Her work is represented in the collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.

Courtesy Mendes Wood DM