Friends Indeed Gallery presents a first solo exhibition of new paintings by Lauren Quin in the Bay Area.

Lauren Quin’s paintings are an ocular conundra; comfortable in their own pattern of disruption, as if disruption was the norm. Marks swarm and dissolve, spaces grow and collapse, and layers weave and pull apart. These paintings require different types of looking at different moments, and from different vantage points. They remind us that our field of perception is itself fractured and ambivalent.

Drawing from a pool of the unformed and the entropic, Quin renders shapes caught in a process of emergence or recession. Parts grow out of other parts. And like bacteria, material starts to infect and invade. Her mark-making implies a passage between or network among dimensions that generate sensuality and movement. They reveal a nimble boundary between fetish and foul, blood and marrow, purity and perversion.

Quin drags a dull knife or the tip of her fingernail through wet paint, creating figures and forms that animate through volumetric tubes. Gouged into their surfaces are delicate etchings that look like the gleam of fish skins or the flicker of light through Venetian blinds. Such sharp marks seem to pull themselves up from the painting while also cutting holes through it. They, like the paintings themselves, move forward and back, unresolvable. Proximity is a messy business.

Lauren Quin (b. 1992) was born in Los Angeles and raised in Atlanta, Georgia and now lives between Los Angeles and San Francisco. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019.