Lauren Luloff - From the Sheets

The gallery is pleased to announce From the Sheets, a solo show featuring new works by Lauren Luloff. Employing bed sheets, found textiles, and expressionistic brushwork, the artist combines a sense of rural domesticity with the artistic legacy of Abstract Expressionism.

Sometimes using bed sheets with personal significance, the artist embeds the works with aspects of her personal history and life experience: “I really like using the bits of patterns which have this nostalgic quality or act as signifiers of certain moments in someone’s history, or my own history. Certain patterns invoke this – like a stab of a memory – my brother’s sheets from 1985…I have sheets that my parents used to sleep in, and they’re divorced now…There’s a lot of pulling from my own history…”

Evoking Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines” and Helen Frankenthaler’s pours, the artist’s works oscillate between wall-based and free-standing paintings. Twisting and turning in their skewed stances and positions, the works confront you as you enter and loiter in your head when you leave. Consisting of fabrics pulled skin-tight over wooden frames, the histories of their respective creative processes are wholly revealed to the public through layers of paint, cut-outs, collage, and appendages.

“I have all these posts in the middle of my studio, so automatically the paintings are positioned in these weird hovering spaces. Without thinking about it they fall into arrangements, I walk around them, the sunlight makes them transparent glowing shields, and they do abstract each other. From each perspective you get a different view: you see this through this, then I start moving them more, and that’s really interesting to me…The back is just as important as the front. I like there to be a front and a back. I like the area that is ignored in the act of creating. And in ignoring it something beautiful happens.”

Lauren Luloff (b. 1980, Dover, NH) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a BFA from Pennsylvania State University and she is a MFA candidate at Bard College. She has been included in exhibitions at Rivington Arms, New York; Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn; and OK Mountain, Austin; among others. Her work has been discussed in NY Arts Magazine and Vellum.