The New York Times
The T List
March 29, 2023

Visceral, Kaleidoscopic Paintings in Kansas

Lauren Quin’s “Cold Trailing” (2022), on display at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan.
Credit… Courtesy of the artist, Blum & Poe and Micki Meng

The title of the painter Lauren Quin’s first solo museum show, at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kan., is aptly, “My Hellmouth.” The phrase is inspired by “The Visions of Tondal,” a medieval manuscript that recounts a knight’s visit to the underworld, and to look at Quin’s paintings is to traverse a tangle of abstract openings and tunnels that ominously seem to lead nowhere. To create one of her works, Quin, who lives in Los Angeles, uses both sides of the canvas; the marks she produces on the back influence what is on the front. Her use of this technique grew out of her early days in the studio when, to save on materials, she doubled up works on one canvas. “I started to feel like I had all this work on my side, and that I was imbuing the pieces with secret notations,” says Quin, though she happily, if a little cryptically, shares some of the symbols that she embedded in the pieces for this show: “It’s a game of visual telephone. A spider bleeds into the sun, which bleeds into an eye.” Quin likes when “one symbol cuts off another and creates a third.”