BOOK: Lauren Quin-My Hellmouth, Blum Books

The paintings of Lauren Quin have mesmerized audiences with their electric colors and pulsating lines. Her compositions contain an intricate language of overlapping shapes (most recently, Légeresque tubes), engendering a dizzying multitude of compositional center points. Each painting features motifs—spider, needle, sun—which she then transfers onto the canvas through a monoprint technique. “My Hellmouth” is the first comprehensive monograph on Quin, accompanying her 2023 solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. Featuring a foreword by Nerman director JoAnne Northrup, essays by art historian Fanny Singer and artist and writer Juliana Halpert, and an interview with the artist by curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, “My Hellmouth” also provides insight into Quin’s artistic process.  Balancing compositional weight and density throughout, the Lauren Quin works concentration of experimentation and unknowability ‘makes a box, like that of Schrödinger’s cat, an apt metaphor. Quin’s tube mark reappears as a mysterious container—unknowable, but cohesive. Either growing like limbs or clustered and abbreviated in scale-like gestures, Quin’s tube formations meditate on a shape that is simultaneously a tunnel and a hole, a structure and a space, or a mirage of presence carved out by absence.-Efi Michalarou