Lauren Luloff’s paintings on silk often emerge from en plein air observations of flowers, plants, trees, and bodies of water, and her recent works have developed to become more geometrical, with ardent grids, mosaics, and mazes. The twelve new paintings now on view in a solo exhibition at Dunes.fyi, in Portland, Maine, are part of what Luloff describes as her nocturnal paintings. Created in her studio in Lubec, Maine, the artist often painted the pieces during and after the winter sunsets. While occasional clusters of flowers and full blooms appear, they emerge through colorized verticals, steady lines, and pixels, such as in Winter and Glowing Question (2023), a large-scale portrait of Luloff’s home on a snowy bank by water, surrounded by images such as cherries, open-and-closed purple buds, constellations, flipped question marks (as though seen in a mirror), and a staircase.
These new works showcase recurring fragments of grids, tiles, waves, and mazes. Two Hands (2022), presents blue cresting waves and finger-like curls of water that were inspired by envisioning wave images while listening to a local piano concert. Figures in Fizz (2023), one of the first paintings to introduce figuration, includes enigmatic bodies and hourglass forms. Bird, Watching (2023) is bordered by lilacs and gold rings, representing what Luloff describes as “a bird in darkness, a form that took shape on its own, and arose as a symbol or beacon.”
Luloff’s process often involves cutting her whole silk paintings, which she then rearranges, sews, and binds into new formations, but these particular works were created on solid sheets of silk, aside from the arduously painted strips of silk that wrap around the sides of each painting. Some of her paintings are made to cut from the onset, pushing through any possible hesitations to assemble new arrangements.
