ERIN LAWLOR by Miles McEnery Gallery

ERIN LAWLOR

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

SAVING THE SPACES OF PAINTING: 24 NOTES ON THE WORK OF ERIN LAWLOR By Grant Vetter “Is it conceivable that the exercise of hegemony might leave space untouched?” —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

1. The paintings of Erin Lawlor are among the most accomplished works being made in the field of contemporary art today. When we talk about Baroque tendencies in painting, be they figurative or abstract, her name is prominent. Her work is in dialogue with the paintings of artists like David Reed, Jenny Saville, Karin Davie, and Glenn Brown. The output of this group of artists has come to represent some of the most radical painting being done in the early twenty-first century. That’s not because these painters have returned to mining the Baroque for its formal inventiveness, nor because of their ability to create a sense of realism. Rather, the abiding drive behind the neo-Baroque impulse is the need to find an idiom that can adequately address the growing complexities of the world around us, and the cartographic function of the Baroque has proved to be incredibly well suited for just this task.1 2. While a renewed interest in the Baroque has certainly made itself felt over the last few decades, this shift was predicted by many artists, including Frank Stella, whose work took a dramatic turn—from promulgating a kind of flatness that mirrored the format of his substrates toward engaging with a deep dynamism that reached well beyond the confines of the canvas. In this regard, Stella’s foresight helped us to identify how the embrace of Baroque aesthetics could provide one possible route beyond the impasse of late modern and even postmodern painting, both of which had grown flatter and flatter with each passing generation.2

3. The rejection of this kind of gross reductionism is what fueled Stella’s enthusiastic defense of the Baroque during the famed Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard,

where Stella propounded a picture of the potential pitfalls for abstract art if it continued to follow the path that was defended by critics like Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, and Harold Rosenberg; not to mention Rosalind E. Krauss, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster.3 What ultimately emerged in the wake of these public speaking engagements was a widespread embrace of post-essentialist perspectives that would begin to move us beyond the theoretical tête-à-tête of the last representatives of the avant-garde and the waning influence of the neo-avant-garde.

4. Running contrary to both of these camps, Stella found a way to challenge such

polemics, which were almost exclusively focused on the uses and abuses of space in contemporary painting. Toward this end, he defended a series of theses in the book Working Space that resulted in the following three conclusions: First, that while painting has always been in crisis, and has even been pronounced dead, finished, and done with more times in the twentieth century than one cares to admit, the truth of the matter is that our collective interest in the medium was never really displaced by photography, the ready-made, or the explosion of new genres—rather, it was heightened by the need for painting to articulate its relationship with these ongoing developments. Second, Stella defended the notion that progressive painting practices had already come to share a space within a greatly expanded field of concerns about artistic production, and from his perspective the genre was already on a return trip to center stage in the artworld. Just how prescient this observation really was would become more and more evident as the 1980s progressed. Last, there was Stella’s declaration that the perpetual incorporation of new ideas is germane to the practice of painting in any era, and it will always be up to painters to deepen what can be done with the medium, both spatially and conceptually. From these insights, Stella concluded that the exclusion of any one element—and especially the feeling for a greater depth of field in painting—would constitute a serious misstep if abstract art was going to remain relevant through the end of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first century.4

5. This isn’t to say that the push toward dematerialization, conceptualism, and different forms of minimalist and systems-based painting had lost any of their impact during the era of high theory, only that these rather ascetic models of artistic production

would be confronted by the excesses associated with Baroque aesthetics in the years ahead. Furthermore, the critical import of these more austere isms turned out to be just as consumable as any other genre in art at that time, so much so in fact, that many of these artistic camps ended up evidencing what Fredric Jameson would call the logic of late capitalism by adopting the look of technologization, the feel of computation, and the worship of ideation.5 These paradoxes weren’t lost on Stella, nor on any of the artists who had become interested in the resources of the Baroque, beauty, and even affect theory, not to mention a whole host of other premodern concepts that had been relegated to the dustbins of history by influential critics and other institutional gatekeepers.

6. For our purposes here, it is important to recognize how these discourses about the depiction of space—or really the lack thereof—came to dominate painting in the second half of the twentieth century, to the near exclusion of other concerns.6 Running contrary to this corpus of prohibitive injunctions—most of which were largely reducible to the notion of aesthetic restraint being a good, in-and-of itself—was what allowed Stella’s position to exercise a subtle but persistent influence on painters who were already experimenting with the expanded potential of spatial elements and sculptural forms.

7. One could even say that this kind of extravagance in painting is close to being the reigning ethos of our day, and that notions like medium specificity, essentialism, organic unity, and so on, were actually enlarged, explored, and exploded by neo-Baroque artists from the ’90s and the early 2000s.7 The problem that follows from this situation, however, is that in a devoutly pluralistic age, any unassuming eye might take these ideas to be the central tenets that guide Lawlor’s work, but this would be correct only to a degree, and not in the way that one might first imagine.

8. What I would like to suggest here is that something very different and far more complex has been afoot in Lawlor’s painting practice since its inception. In order to understand this, it is necessary to redress the notion of medium specificity as it was defined by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, rather than Clement Greenberg, because this particular idea was never adequately explored by the Cool School or even by

other Abstract Expressionists on the international scene.8 This was because a great deal of action painting had abandoned the use of nuanced compositional devices in favor of creating bold painterly statements. Or, if abstract painters were less inclined to work in the style of the all-over, they tended to reproduce big graphic impressions absent the feeling tone of a fuller scale of chromatic possibilities. The result of both these approaches was the repetition of a shallow sense of space throughout the whole of the genre, be it gestural, geometric, or otherwise.

9. Of course, during this period of art, it was thought that what was essential to

painting was its flatness. But the contradiction between what the medium was and how it was to be used remained a false dichotomy from the start. The fact is that what was truly supplemental and what was genuinely essential to the act of painting could never be clearly demarcated, and the many ways that the picture plane was already part of a five-planed object that sat jutting out from the wall—framed or unframed—revealed that there were hidden theatrics behind what the theorist Mark Cheetham referred to as “the rhetoric of purity in modernism.”9 In contrast with these positions, Lawlor’s work sits as a stark recognition of just how limited such perspectives really were by way of having achieved a velvety sense of three-dimensional space that shows us the true depth and breadth of what medium specificity could mean, absent the distribution of paint being used to reinforce the univocal plane of the substrate.

10. Once we recognize that the ability to overcome the fact that this contradiction not only exists, but that it opens painting back up to the full resources of its material comportment, then all of the talk about essentialism, purity, or reductionism in abstract art only demonstrates how the large majority of its practitioners tend to be autodidacts of a sort. This is most visible in the work of the first generation of Ab-Ex painters, where the act of painting became somewhat akin to the signature of the artist himself. I say himself and not herself, nor they, them, or any of the other pronouns, because of the men of Ab-Ex painting who received the lion’s share of success early on. A few commentators have noted that this sacrosanct space of white male privilege was commodified, and even co-opted, by the American government. This has to do with the number of these artists who ended up turning their work into formulaic patterns

Erin Lawlor Studio, 2021, London, United Kingdom

of a type or kind, simply because this model of iconicity worked incredibly well for both the art market and geopolitics.10

11. After all, one can walk into any museum today and recognize a Mark Rothko, a Jackson Pollock, a Barnett Newman, a Morris Louis, a Clyfford Still, or a Franz Klein from many rooms away, but the everyday art lover would be hard-pressed to make the same claim on behalf of female painters and other minority voices who worked during the same movement at the same time. Beyond the role that sexism and racism has played in the houses of high art—both then and now—there is another consideration: The kind of painting that rolled out of studios in a manner similar to the way Henry Ford rolled cars off the factory floor, ultimately ended up endorsing a rather doctrinaire model of creative genius.11 12. This was not only because the industrialization of artistic production mirrored the ideology of capitalism at that time—with regard to how it was packaged and presented to an audience—but that even the idea of the artist as a laborer of repetitive actions, the idea that the picture plane could be broken down and reassembled from its constituent parts and pieces, or the notion that the terminology accorded

to making flatbed paintings had everything to do with shipping terminology was not lost on figures like the October critics.12 Thus, the values of one world were quickly imposed on those of another when the captains of industry rushed to collect the works that most reflected the symbolic power of their own brands, which is to say that they valorized the artists who became brand identities unto themselves.

13. The problem is that these rather restrictive conditions often resulted in the

sidelining of the contributions of artists like Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, who were far more open to producing variations on a theme than the artists associated with the old boys club and more sensitive to playing off depth against flatness, tactility against washes, and gesture against process. This may have contributed to their exclusion by the gatekeepers of “good taste.” In other words, women and those occupying other minority positions, like Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, and Ed Clark, were simply more inventive with regard to the daily practice of painting than the large majority of their white, male, cis-gendered counterparts. Above all else, Lawlor’s work resonates with this open and polyvalent approach to painting, but without neglecting the iconic lessons of former generations. This is because her work never treats abstraction as a formula or an imprint, which is to say that her practice as a painter is focused on evolving each body of work in situ at a time when a great deal of abstract art has become a parody of itself or, worse yet, a zombified edition of new wave sensibilities.13

14. In order to drive this point home, one need only speak of the role that organic unity plays in Lawlor’s paintings using the definitions that Plato and Aristotle gave to those terms as opposed to, say, the “culturebergs” or the New Critics.14 This is because Plato adopted a definition of organic unity that underscored how identity and difference have a reciprocal role in nature that is based on striving to achieve a sense of equilibrium through the balance of contrasting forces over time.15 Running along similar lines, Aristotle highlighted how this same effect showed itself in works of art by noting how a single stoke, a line in a poem, or a musical chord could not be removed without disturbing the sense of the whole.16 In other words, both philosophers favored an integral picture of aesthetic experience, one which would eventually be called the grand style by adherents of the high Baroque as well as those in the neoclassical

academy who undertook the designs of historical painting. It is this dispositif in both art and life that joins multiplicity and unity, the many and the one, or the implicate order with the explicate order, all of which inform the balance of forces that structure Lawlor’s most ambitious compositions.

15. More importantly, however, we find that when we look back at the history of abstract art from the last hundred years or more, there are really two distinct tendencies that reveal themselves more than any other trend. The first tendency is an exaggerated rigidity that leads to the valorization of architectonic motifs, such as neoplasticism, hard-edge abstraction, neo-concretism, etc. The second tendency is the exact opposite, inasmuch as it represents a wild sense of frenetic energy, spread across the canvas and often lacking any real sense of reserve or discernment. This would include the movements of Tachisme, Gestural Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, the Washington School, etc. In contrast to these divergent camps, we can say that Lawlor’s work is a superb example of how abstract art can act as a vanishing mediator between such extremes, granting the energetic a sense of the poetic while cultivating the intimations of a structuralist approach that isn’t reducible to geometric strictures.

16. This is to say that Lawlor’s work is one of the few examples of organic unity in painting that captures the breadth of this concept with regard to the full measure of its implications, from the ancient past to the present. This is because her work unites the exuberance of the Baroque, teetering as it does on chaos, with the control of rigorously ordered spatial relations. Organic unity, after all, describes the unity of affect, which the moderns attribute to the insights of gestalt and depth psychology, but which were evidenced by works throughout all of art history that combined spontaneity and structure, play and order, and harmony and dissonance in a distributed measure.17 In this regard, Lawlor’s oeuvre is a testament to moving beyond the logic of excluded middle, or of making aesthetic propositions that can find a third way between the bifurcated forces of the rectilinear and the gestural, or that even tend to embrace what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze referred to as the logic of sense and nonsense.18

17. If all of the above observations are taken to be true, it leads us to ask just what it is that we are encountering in the works of Lawlor that has eluded so many of the canonical figures of abstract art? Beyond finding a balance between, and an extension of, certain ideals within late modern and postmodern painting, the answer would have to be that there is a rare sense of pictorial drama in Lawlor’s paintings that borders on creating the narrative sense of a Baroque passion play given over to us in a singular image.19 We see this in her choice of palette, which is often dominated by somber colors juxtaposed against bright bold passages, where the pictorial punctum of each piece is evidenced through the sheer impact of visual panache. The evocative and emotive tenor of Lawlor’s works also shows itself through the dance of ribbon-like swaths of paint that are laid down with such virtuosity that they become singing characters set forth against a compositional chorus of melodic gestures and undulating forms.

18. For all of these reasons, Lawlor’s superb sense of écriture, or of paint handling as a type of pictorial writing, marks her as one of the most important neo-Baroque artists of our generation. This is not just because of how the motif of the fold plays itself out in gesture upon gesture, or through the choreographed interchange of point and counterpoint in each painting, or even because of the dynamic role that chiaroscuro plays in the revealing and concealing of forms. I would go so far as to venture the idea that her works have surpassed those towering figures of abstraction like Cy Twombly, Howard Hodgkin, and Sue Williams, because Lawlor resists partitioning the aforementioned motifs from each other, and the calligraphic import of her work is more deft, spontaneous, and lyrical by measure, meter, and sensibility. That the sublime integration of all of these elements is at the very heart of Lawlor’s work should be obvious to any casual viewer, critic, or patron of the arts, even at first glance. 19. And while one can certainly appreciate all of the above, what is truly remarkable about the performative aspects of Lawlor’s gestural marks has to do with her ability to lay down discrete passages of paint that capture a moment in time, a movement in space, and a trace inscription across the grain of the canvas that works in tandem with how single, diptych, and triptych formats are all deployed in a way that is in

dialogue with the highly compressed, three-act structure of Baroque theater.20 One could even say that the sense of space in her paintings often mirrors the same depth of field that is articulated by the three sets of common stage directions, where her gestures fall upstage, center stage, or downstage, depending on where you are standing in relation to the work. What gives them a distinct touch of the kind of gravitas that we tend to attribute to modern masterworks is that all of this contrasts with how every last mark is applied to the surface of the canvas in a way that threatens to break through the fourth wall of the theater of painting by being so palpably present as to draw us directly into the pictorial drama by way of the eye alone.21

20. We have touched on the most readily apparent aspect of Lawlor’s art practice, namely, that her work courts a sense of confrontation with the most accomplished paintings from the history of art. She has also surmounted some of the most challenging ideas that circumscribed painting toward the close of the last century. Rather than slavishly returning to the themes that defined the work of the first-, second-, and third-wave Abstract Expressionists, Lawlor took a different path by being part of a rogue wave of painters who came into public consciousness at the height of the debates about the return of the Baroque in contemporary art and who have expanded the valances of that idiom ever since.22 While this chronology provides us with a brief summary of the trajectory and development of Lawlor’s work, we have yet to inquire about how her most recent body of paintings resonate with this specific moment in cultural production.

21. Here, we return one last time to Stella’s writings about abstract art needing to delve deeply into the question of space, because space is inherently political. The value of “holding space” for another by being mentally, emotionally, and physically present has become increasingly important in recent years, and not just in interpersonal or intersubjective relationships, but also in terms of speaking truth to power. Today, we also hear about space being politicized through the creation of “safe spaces,” so that tough issues can be voiced without the immediate intercession of prejudice, aggression, or even retribution. And space has become ever more politicized with the rise of societies of control, which are based on the rigorous monitoring of public spaces, transit, and even personal forms of identification.23

22. In other words, how we negotiate space has implications for politics as well as aesthetics. Stella might have been right in more ways than one when he suggested Working Space as the title of his lectures, because it is in the realm of public, private, and institutional spaces that we still have the most work to do. Space, after all, is what gives us the halls where we voice our personal concerns, where we air our collective passions, and where we vote for political change. Above all else, space is where the consequences of our commitments are laid bare in the public realm for judgment, just as space represents the place in art where new forms of meaning can evidence themselves in the never-ending contest of ideas that have to do with how we give value to different artistic dispositions.

23. As part of a moment when the implications of taking up space, occupying space,

and even replicating non-spaces are hotly debated, Lawlor’s work acts as a reflection of these concerns. It is placed before us as an allegory about the interplay of nonobjective qualities, which is to say that her works allude to the demonstrative aspects of space as such, without being reducible to illusionism.24 And perhaps, this kind of painting helps us to find meaning in our time and place in history, because Lawlor’s works create the kind of spaces in which we have no desire to look away from how the passion play of life is always implicated in the living quality of pictorial events.

24. Lawlor isn’t just another adherent of the neo-Baroque impulse; she has reinvented its means and themes in a way that has given a new relevance to the practice of abstract painting and to what can be achieved in the world of fine art. That is the highest mark of contemporaneity that any artist can reach for, and not just with regard to today or tomorrow, but for years, decades, and centuries to come. Consequently, Lawlor’s practice as a painter represents one such project, where each new body of work not only uses the full resources of the past, but also opens new doors onto the horizon of painting’s possible future.

Grant Vetter is the Program Director of Fine Art Complex 1101, the author of The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses, and an instructor in curatorial theory and art criticism at Arizona State University.

Endnotes 1. The idea that a return to Baroque aesthetics offers us a wide array of conceptual resources when it comes to navigating an increasingly complex and interconnected world is what undergirds Gregg Lambert’s “Baroque Thesis” from The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, Omar Calabrese’s conclusions about the Neo-Baroque being a sign of the times, and Angela Ndalianis’s description of the role that Baroque mechanisms now play in mass culture. Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004); Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004); and Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 2. Frank Stella describes this general crisis in abstract painting in the following way: “Broadly speaking, the present crisis can be defined by two major disappointments that 20th century abstraction has experienced. One of them is the feeling that Mondrian’s example and accomplishment have gone for naught. The other is that by 1970, it appeared that the most promising branch of postwar American painting—the successors of Barnett Newman, the color field abstractionists—had turned to ash. . . ” Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 1, 160.

3. Frank Stella addressed many of the major positions that were associated with modern art criticism through the use of a negative ontology or, really, by adopting a strategy of negative dialectics with regard to the dictums of high modernism. Ibid, p. 98. 4. The heart of Stella’s argument here is that the progressive telos of painting was not that of reductionism but of winning a space for itself. First from its illustrative function as a part of architecture and religion, second as a servant of the academy and state ideologies, and third from the conventions of illusionism as a means of imitation. Ibid, p. 164. 5. As much as the common traits of postmodernism are thought to be pastiche, parody, and self-reflexivity, Fredric Jameson’s reading of “the cultural turn” tended to privilege discontinuity, reproduction, and, most importantly for our interests here, “a mutation in built space itself” that eventually found its way into contemporary painting. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 38. 6. This line of thinking is best elucidated through the series of texts collected in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). 7. This tendency is probably most visible in exhibitions like Neo-Baroque!, curated by Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce B. Korotkin; The Silent Baroque, curated by Christian Leigh; Low-Fi Baroque, curated by Michael Sarff and Carol Stakenas; and many other surveys of the neo-Baroque impulse.

8. While Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, does everything it can to differentiate the nature of literary form from painterly expression along the lines of duration, descriptive capabilities, and narrative sense, what Lessing holds to be unique to painting above all else is the immediate perception of its at-onceness. This concept was taken up during modernism by Clement Greenberg. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (New York: Dover Publications, 2005). 9. Jacques Derrida had already fully deconstructed any notion of essentialism in painting in his landmark work, The Truth in Painting, and the critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe followed Derrida’s conclusions to their logical endpoint in Art After Deconstruction. But the most trenchant and committed contribution to this kind of critique remains Mark A. Cheetham’s The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting. Cheetham covers this shift in both Mark A. Cheetham, The Rhetoric of Purity: Essentialist Theory and the Advent of Abstract Painting (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance and Cure Since the 1960s (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

13. Lawlor’s work points 180 degrees in the opposite direction of ZoFo aesthetics by surpassing even Stella’s greatest proclamations about how painting can reclaim a greater sense of space in a number of different ways. 14. The “culturebergs” was a term that was commonly used to refer to Clement Greenberg, Leo Steinberg, and Harold Rosenberg during the era of high modernism. By contrast, The New Critics were often characterized as being purveyors of neo-formalist criticism, inasmuch as they tended to look at texts as closed, autonomous systems. 15. Plato’s organicist cosmology and defense of an animistic universe are essential to the arguments being put forth here about the idea of organic unity, because that is what was adopted wholesale by modern art critics and historians. This is in contrast to Plato’s theory of forms, which provided him with (1) a doctrine of logic universals in the form of naming classes of objects, (2) a theory of ontology about reality and existence, (3) an epistemology about what we can really know in terms of something that does not change, and (4) a series of axioms about art that offer us a theory of value as well. See Whitney J. Oates, Plato’s View of Art (New York: Scribner, 1972).

10. The adoption and even the co-option of abstraction as part of a CIA-funded campaign to exhibit “The New American Painting” throughout the world was part of a concerted effort to celebrate the Western values of heroic individualism, free expression, and creativity, free of state influence, on the world stage. See Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and John J. Curley, Global Art and the Cold War (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2019) for a fuller account of these issues.

16. In contrast with Plato, Aristotle equated the goal of the fine arts as the ability to provide both emotional pleasure and rational enjoyment—but not one at the expense of the other. This definition of organic unity, which combined the ideas of intellection and speculative delight, was influential on modern art criticism. This is because all-over painting, action painting, and even flatbed painting were placed under the sign of organic unity by Greenberg, Steinberg, and Rosenberg. See Francis Fergusson, Aristotle’s Poetics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961) and S.H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New York: Dover, 1951).

11. With the rise of modernism, the notion of Romantic genius as the transcendental subject of supersensible perception was transmuted into the uniquely capitalist form of the enfant terrible, where artists became the subject by expressing their own inner nature rather than expressing nature itself.

17. The history of organic unity during the modern era has its origins in the writings of Paul Cézanne on color, the theory of push-pull by Hans Hofmann, the teachings of the Bauhaus and Josef Albers on the relativity of color, and so on.

12. Of the four major October critics, it was probably Yve-Alain Bois who dedicated the most time to understanding how late modern and postmodern painting was engaged in “The Task of Mourning”. This critique was grounded in overcoming the Neoplatonic belief in painting as a pure medium—by way of understanding how different isms were simply competing systems, or different “models” for making art. While this had already been noted by Marcelin Pleynet in Painting and System as early as 1977, it was Bois and the rest of the October critics who would foreground the historicity of painting to undermine the transcendental claims that had been made on behalf of abstraction for nearly half a century. See Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); and Marcelin Pleynet, Painting and System, trans. Sima Godfrey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

18. The law of the excluded middle, which states that for every proposition either the proposition is true or its negation is true, still ruled over late modern and early postmodern art criticism. The inheritance of Enlightenment rationalism included (1) Alfred Barr’s developmental diagram of modern art movements, (2) the idea that the painting was becoming a more rational enterprise by interrogating its own means, and (3) the notion that the reduction of pictorialism to a handful of abstract concepts constituted the a priori conditions of progressive painting. 19. If the major traits of the passion play were the expansion and consolidation of previous works and themes, and the embrace of elaborate staging and set design that make no distinction between artifice and reality, not to mention the

adoption of a rather direct quality with regard to how dialog and action take place in a piece—then we can also say that these traits are present in the work of Erin Lawlor. 20. Compression in a Baroque play has to do with a certain directness with regard to approach. This accelerates the pace and content of the play at the same time that the public spectacle of it would require an elaboration of means. In Lawlor’s work, this is most evident with regard to the contrast between forms and their scale. 21. Two regimes of sense making, that of the canvas and that of the world, are sutured together by what is most visible on the surface. Taken from a Lacanian perspective, the canvas acts as a screen between the object and the geometrical point of the viewer; between the picture itself and a point of light projected outside the picture; between the gaze and the subject of representation—and all of this is implicated in the fact that “Everything one sees has a material reality that corresponds as a whole and as all of its parts with the image.” Matthew D. Stroud, The Play and the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996), p. 211. 22. The neo-Baroque impulse (NeoBo) has been ascribed to projects as different as those of Mathew Barney and Bill Viola in video art; those of Glenn Brown and Jenny Saville in figurative art; those of David Reed and Karin Davie in abstract art; those of Matthew Richie and Sarah Sze in installation art; those of Darren Aronofsky and Terrence Malick in independent film; those of Lana and Lilly Wachowski and Jerry Bruckheimer in blockbuster films; those of Lady Gaga and Lana Del Rey in pop music; and the later works of Frank Gehry and Norman Foster in architecture. 23. For Gilles Deleuze, the rise of “societies of control” was intimately related to the crisis of enclosures, where monitoring and motivating the subjects of late capitalism would become the principle drive of discipline/bio-power. The connection with how space has become politicized today has to do with the fight against coercive practices in prisons, hospitals, factories, universities, and other key institutions. 24. Marc Augé has deemed the reproduction of non-spaces around the world as a phenomenon of supermodernity. These spaces represent the smooth spaces of capital and the process of globalization, as opposed to the striated identity of a given culture or people. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995) and Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017).

allegory I, 2020 Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

circe, 2020

Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

electric sheep, 2020 Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

frolic (the waves), 2020 Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

kooks, 2020

Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

lay it down, 2020 Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

light ahead, 2020 Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 inches 180 x 120 cm

midsummer, 2020 Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

river, 2020

Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches 40 x 30 cm

roll on Mae, 2020 Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

roller, 2020

Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

shell/lip, 2020

Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

the misfits, 2020

Oil on canvas 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

conch, 2021 Oil on canvas 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

cornfield (vincent), 2021 Oil on canvas 13 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches 35 x 45 cm

distant voices, 2021 Oil on canvas 17 3/4 x 13 7/8 inches 45 x 35 cm

gimblette, 2021 Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 47 1/4 inches 180 x 120 cm

hot (smacker), 2021 Oil on canvas 17 3/4 x 13 7/8 inches 45 x 35 cm

la vie en rose, 2021 Oil on canvas 74 7/8 x 153 1/2 inches 190 x 390 cm

minnie, 2021 Oil on canvas 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches 90 x 70 cm

stormfront, 2021 Oil on canvas 13 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches 35 x 45 cm

strawberry chops, 2021 Oil on canvas 17 3/4 x 13 7/8 inches 45 x 35 cm

summer storm, 2021 Oil on canvas 74 7/8 x 102 3/8 inches 190 x 260 cm

ERIN LAWLOR Born in Epping, United Kingdom in 1969 Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

2015 “Opening Scene,” Galerie Klaus Braun, Stuttgart, Germany “Four Paintings: London Fields,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA

2018 “A Brief History of Abstraction,” Rønnebæksholm, Denmark “L’Echappée Belle, Erin Lawlor/Bram van Velde,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France

EDUCATION

2014 “Long Loud Silence,” Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX

2017 “Drei Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart” Institut français, Mainz, Germany

1992 BA, University of Paris IV – La Sorbonne, Paris, France

2013 “Recent Paintings,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2021 “entre chien et loup,” Luca Tommasi Contemporary Art, Milan, Italy

2012 “Recent Paintings,” George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Anima,” Espace Mezcla, Rouen, France “Erin Lawlor,” Knott Gallery, Brussels, Belgium 2010 “Peintures,” Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, Paris, France

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 “Memory of a Free Festival,” Fox/Jensen/McCroy, Auckland, New Zealand 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2018 “Cat on the raz,” Espacio Valverde, Madrid, Spain “Hiraeth,” Fox/Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia “Erin Lawlor,” Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “Here to the Hidden Hills,” Fifi Projects, San Pedro, Mexico 2017 “Erin Lawlor, onomatopoeia,” Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia 2016 “New Works,” La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA “Erin Lawlor,” Rod Barton, Brussels, Belgium “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark

2021 “Raven,” Fox Jensen, Sydney, Australia “Summer Exhibition: Reclaiming Magic,” The Royal Academy of Art, London, United Kingdom “10,” PM/AM, London, United Kingdom “Holding Hands” (curated by William Gustafsson), Union Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2020 “Hallucinogenic” (curated by Koen Deleare), Gerhard Hofland Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands 2019 “Press Print!,” Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark “Les couleurs naissent et meurent,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France “Wet Wet Wet: Erin Lawlor/Aida Tomescu/Liat Yossifor,” Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “British Painting 2019,” Space K, Seoul, South Korea

2013 “Ausklang und Auftakt,” Corona Unger Gallery, Bremen, Germany “The Nature of Abstraction,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA “Reason and Romance,” 6b-Elingen gallery, Belgium “What I like about you,” Parallel Art Space, New York, NY “Emergence,” Hotel de Sauroy, Paris, France

2016 “Whitfield Street,” Rod Barton, London, United Kingdom “Bête Noire/Candyman,” The Neutra Museum, Los Angeles, CA “David Achenbach Projects,” COFA Contemporary, Cologne, Germany “A full open hand, drippings, and carefully masked lines,” Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus, Denmark “Thru the rabbit hole,” Sideshow Nation, New York, NY

2012 “Turbulence,” George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Moveable Feast,” Hotel de Sauroy, Paris, France

2015 “White Album,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “The seed of its opposite,” Kelvin College, Glasgow, United Kingdom “Seven Painters,” Arcade Gallery, Cardiff, United Kingdom “Peer Review,” Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom “Erin Lawlor/James Geccelli,” Raumx Project Space, London, United Kingdom “Making History,” Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY “Tutti Frutti,” Turps Gallery, London, United Kingdom “Suchness/Sosein,” RAUMX Project Space, London, United Kingdom “Arbeiten auf Papier,” Galerie Klaus Braun, Stuttgart, Germany

RESIDENCIES

2014 “Ellipse, a Partial Inventory from the West,” A3 Gallery, Moscow, Russia “Women and the Dune,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Off Line On Mark,” Parallel Art Space, Ridgewood, NY “Mind the Gap,”Autonomie Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Nothing but good live,” Park Platform for Visual Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia

2011 “Jeune Création,” Paris, France “Jérémy Chabaud et Erin Lawlor,” Centre d’art Le Bois aux Moines, Lavaré, France

2017 La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA 2016 Painting Symposium and Residency, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA

SELECT COLLECTIONS New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ERIN LAWLOR 3 February – 12 March 2022 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2021 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved  Essay © 2021 Grant Vetter Director of Publications Anastasija Jevtovic, New York, NY Photography by Jeffrey Sturges, New York, NY Colin Mills, London, United Kingdom Peter Mallet, London, United Kingdom Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue designed by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-65-6 Cover: gimblette, (detail), 2021