FEBRUARY – ERIN LAWLOR – SYDNEY

FOX/JENSEN Sydney is thrilled to announce the first solo exhibition of English painter, Erin Lawlor. The gallery will be present Lawlor’s newest paintings alongside selected works from her 2016 solo exhibition Erin Lawlor, Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen and the 2017 exhibition onomatopoeia at Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre for Art in Latvia.

Lawlor hones her vision on the interior of gesture, placing us inside its anatomy. The proximity she offers us is akin to a kind of chromatic MRI of the body of paint. Each gesture seems to fold upon another with shifting degrees of ferment. The looping trajectory of brushstrokes insinuates a shallow depth, but it is the small windows that appear like cavities in the lyric composition that insinuate a deeper space beyond the veils. Such expansive gesture might tempt an autobiographical reading given the apparent tracing of her own movements around the field. However, Lawlor’s gesture has multiple obligations beyond personal profile. Her paintings carry references to both Baroque painting and to poetry with their lyric syntax – and even to the spin and swish of pop culture.

Most critically Lawlor’s paintings transcend the limitations of “process” painting per se and allow for a host of metaphorical implications. There is something of Jacqueline Humphries’ meteorological turbulence and leaner viscosity, and like Humphries, she remains wary of the esoteric baggage attached to abstract expressionism but open to the possibility that painting can shoulder a newer metaphorical weight that neither confirms nor denies the place of data in meaning.

My sense is that these works offer a less encumbered romanticism, something I was reminded of when talking with Erin in her London studio about her works and those of Günter Umberg. His writing seems utterly pertinent to her work…”The way I make something gives me a close relationship to the world…sometimes I think that I wouldn’t even be here without this experience.” This closer relationship to the world brings me back to the intimacy of Lawlor’s dissection of gesture. By placing us so near to this tumult, the painting arouses and heightens our sensitivity without recourse to sentiment.

Erin will be present for the opening of her exhibition.