Chloë Lamb: Appetite for Color by Hollis Taggart

Appetite for Color

SEPTEMBER 12–OCTOBER 12, 2024

ESSAY BY EMILY CHUN

FOREWORD

The fresh spontaneity and lively execution of Chloë Lamb’s paintings can overshadow the depth of studied introspection that propels the artist. Her vivid palette and buoyant forms are visually appealing, yet there is more substance that lies beneath these nuanced seductive abstractions. One label that would describe Chloë as an artist is instinctive. The elemental way in which she intuits the application of paint to surface is coupled with an inherent ability to harmonize colors and present shapes and gestures that conform to her sense of perception of compositional unity.

Chloë gravitates to the oil medium for its sumptuous quality, utilizing the longer drying period to manipulate work and amplify its creation. She can make additions to the “wet” areas, or, when completely dry, paint over them to maneuver the hues. Completely mastering the process, her virtuosity with the handling of paint is evident in her recognizable signature style. It is clear that the action of creation is of paramount importance to Chloë. The sheer energy, palpable exuberance and delight of her work is manifested in the gesture of her varied brushstrokes and exploration of juxtaposing colors while nimbly combining compositional elements. She does on occasion even incorporate representational imagery in her abstractions with ease. A strong visual tension exists but it is moderated by an inherent skill to create a unique equilibrium.

We extend special thanks to Emily Chun for her thought-provoking essay. Her singular approach astutely places Chloë within an art historical context, referencing past stylistic tenets and styles. It is always an exciting event for us to acquire and present new works from Chloë’s studio. There is an uplifting fullness and resonance experienced when viewing her works. They are transliterations of her observations and impressions of the world around her interpreted for us in an incomparable and alluring fashion. Her animated style, spirited approach to the picture plan, and agile manipulation of color keep us intrigued and make her one of the gallery’s most popular contemporary artists.

Hollis C. Taggart

Debra V. Pesci

In February of 1951 at a symposium called “What is Abstract Art?” held at the Museum of Modern Art, Willem de Kooning said the following in his talk:

For the painter to come to the “abstract” or the “nothing,” he needed many things. Those things were always things in life—a horse, a flower, a milkmaid, the light in a room through a window made of diamond shapes maybe, tables, chairs, and so forth. . . . At the time, [the artists] were not abstract about something which was already abstract. They freed the shapes, the light, the color, the space, by putting them into concrete things in a given situation.

In speaking about the originary impulses of abstraction, de Kooning suggests— counter to what we may conventionally believe—that abstraction is not just the reducing or paring down of something into its most fundamental, essential elements. Rather, he says, abstraction is an additive process, one that makes reality more real. It thickens reality and concretizes it into forms and visual situations. The artist “need[s] many things” to create abstraction. In so many words, de Kooning explicates Giorgio Morandi’s observation that “nothing is more abstract than reality.”

Chloë Lamb, too, needs many things to create her abstract works: the scenes and sights of everyday life such as shapes of rubbish on the street, people on the bus, industrial buildings, or trees in the woods. Her paintings register reality in all their true abstractness. Lamb is a deep, porous observer of the world, metabolizing and picking up on everything she sees like an antenna. For Lamb, abstraction is about catching life on the wing and transposing it on canvas without petrifying it.

All of Lamb’s new paintings have the curious quality of seeming as though they are lit by a warm lightbulb from within. They bear no trace of harsh fluorescent light, no “argument” about what art is or anything so certain; instead, they look as though they are emerging from the first rays of dawn, wordless but self-possessed. Such balminess is easy to achieve, of course, when an artist uses chromatically warm

colors like yellows, oranges, and reds. But even the works dominated by coldtemperature blues and grays such as Round and Round (pl. 7) and Beacon of Hope (pl. 4) drip with a studied warmth.

For Lamb, color is form, rather than just another formal element or a “tool.” From these new works especially, one senses that color is a source of true joy and insight for Lamb, something that makes life liveable. She is sensitive to how the same color might show up differently depending on whether it is applied as oil stick as opposed to oil paint (compare, for example, the oil-stick pink in Sign of the Times [pl. 9] and the oil-paint pinks in Away [pl. 3]). The artist says that “some colors, like people, are much easier to get on with and live with. However, also like people, it is necessary to add variety and contrasting and jarring colors to give strength and interest to a composition.” It’s not clear which colors the artist finds “easier to get on with and live with,” though the viewer can hazard a guess from the prevalence of cloudy mint greens and drowsy marigold yellows. What stands clear, however, is Lamb’s unadulterated delight in and appetite for color. Her colors are expressive rather than didactic, freed from descriptive duty. Like Henri Matisse and André Derain, whose principal achievement lay in emancipating color from utilitarian constraints (by using color as form and content), Lamb revels in the intrinsic qualities of paint, testing relationships between colors and their temperatures. In her practice, color is not something to master but rather a secret to tend to without possessing it.

Lamb paints intuitively through improvisational mark-making, building layers and working with wet-on-wet techniques. She prefers to work on the whole surface rather than staying sequestered in one area. Remarkably, Lamb is attuned to the ways in which her ego might overshadow the needs of the painting: “I often find that I have to destroy anything that I am particularly pleased with or hold precious as it stops the work from moving forward and my resolving of the painting as a whole.” It is rare to encounter painting without ego, painting that relinquishes the tyranny of exactitude and control, in order to honestly “impart the sensation of

things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 1917).

Works like Away and Spring Must Be on Its Way (pl. 10) feature glimmers of the natural world, while paintings like Lime and Pink (pl. 6) conjure more abstractly the feeling of grace notes, or the gentle presence of a loved one. The Dionysian frenzy of works like Tuesday Afternoon (pl. 11) and A Clearing (pl. 1) furnish the canvases with tangles and vortexes without a center. On the contrary, airier paintings like Lime and Pink, Round and Round, and Sherbet Lemon (pl. 8) hold more negative space and breathe more easily.

Over the years, Lamb’s compositions have grown more complex and dynamic. Her early works were purely representational before becoming more abstract in the 2010s, as she experimented with carefully calibrated zones of color reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn. Over the last ten years, Lamb’s paintings have shifted from languorous, tectonic swaths of color to more fugitive, kaleidoscopic brush strokes that animate the canvas with a certain ease. As such, Lamb’s new paintings are both formal propositions and emotional evocations. They are reveries drenched in color, existing at the edge of sleep, restoring us to softer, more permeable versions of ourselves.

Emily Chun

August 2024

Emily Chun is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Stanford University, where she studies modern and contemporary art with particular attention to art of the 1980s and ‘90s. She has contributed research and curatorial writing to the Anderson Collection at Stanford, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Tufts University Art Galleries.

1. A CLEARING

2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

40 x 35 IN. (101.6 x 88.9 CM)

2. ABOVE AND BEYOND 2023, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

40 x 35 IN. (101.6 x 88.9 CM)

2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

20 x 15 IN. (50.8 x 38.1 CM)

3. AWAY

2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

10 x 10 IN. (25.4 x 25.4 CM)

BEACON OF HOPE

5. CHALLENGE

2023, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

50 x 50 IN. (127 x 127 CM)

40 x 35 IN. (101.6 x 88.9 CM)

6. LIME AND PINK 2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

ROUND AND ROUND

2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

40 x 40 IN. (101.6 x 101.6 CM)

2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

20 x 24 IN. (50.8 x 61 CM)

8. SHERBET LEMON

10 x 10 IN. (25.4 x 25.4 CM)

9. SIGN OF THE TIMES 2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

10. SPRING MUST BE ON ITS WAY 2024, OIL ON

LINEN CANVAS

24 x 20 IN. (61 x 50.8 CM)

TUESDAY AFTERNOON 2024, OIL ON LINEN CANVAS

40 x 35 IN. (101.6 x 88.9 CM)

BIOGRAPHY

As a painter, Chloë Lamb is a sensualist in the most compelling way. Viewing one of Lamb’s paintings, large or small, it is evident what she has articulated all along: her passion for all of oil paint’s attributes. She is inspired by its pigment, the ability to thin it out into a glaze or build its density up to incredible dimension, and especially its long drying time, which allows her to paint wet into wet––a technique not easily mastered. She works instinctually with her materials. Unable to (and uninterested in) envisioning the final outcome of a painting, Lamb works on each until she sees it to completion, in a way conjuring from those very attributes that she admires so much.

Lamb is primarily an abstract painter, which is not to say that her work never veers towards representation. To the contrary, Lamb’s observational tendencies cause her work to linger slightly in the realm of representation. This could encompass a landscape (resembling something of a color field painting), with a fore-, middle, and background, a single cloud in an otherwise unarticulated sky, or a clearly rendered tulip amidst soft approximations of other flowers. Lamb has also experimented with figural painting, which maintains similar abstract elements but brings others into greater focus. It is in a purer abstraction, however, where Lamb is most at home.

Rather than creating an under-drawing in graphite or diluted paint, Lamb begins her paintings with a blank canvas and the first stroke of paint laid down by the brush. She likes to build her materials, playing with levels of transparency and opacity but also with negative space, which she considers crucial to a painting’s success. For Lamb it really is about this process—lines and blocks of color laid down, followed by an instinctual building up of paint that can often breed form. She is not interested in over-intellectualizing abstract art but prefers the viewer to take as much pleasure in the sumptuousness of the paint on the canvas as she did in placing it there. Her paintings, at their very core, are about making the very best of oil paint’s attributes.

While painting has been an ongoing passion for Lamb, it was not until she was married and had her first child that she decided to focus more seriously on art. She came from an artistically inclined family, with a father who graduated from Slade School of Fine Art and a mother who took handicraft to new heights at home and in the garden. In

the early 1990s, Lamb attended the Heatherly School of Fine Art where she finessed her technical skills. She also took classes under Robin Child (part of the pedagogical lineage of Walter Sickert) at Lydgate Art Research Center in Wiltshire after working for several years in another unrelated field.

Lamb was born in 1960 and grew up in Wiltshire. She exhibits regularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. She lives and works in Hampshire, United Kingdom.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2024

Portland Gallery, London

2022

Portland Gallery, London

2021

Portland Gallery, London

2020

Hollis Taggart, New York

2019

Portland Gallery, London

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

2018

Portland Gallery, London

2017

Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York

Cricket Fine Art, London

2015

Cricket Fine Art, London

2014

Cricket Fine Art, London

2008

Cricket Fine Art, London

Birnham Wood Gallery, East Hampton, NY 2005

Cricket Fine Art, London

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2024

Dynamic Rhythm: Geometric Abstraction from the 1950s to the Present, Hollis Taggart, New York

Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

2023

Of the Past and Present: Estates and Contemporary Artists at Hollis Taggart, Hollis Taggart, New York

Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

2022

Parallels: Chloë Lamb and Bill Scott, Hollis Taggart, Southport, CT

Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

2020

This Land Is Your Land, Hollis Taggart, online

2019

Summer Selections, Hollis Taggart, New York

Selections from Our Contemporary Collection, Hollis Taggart, New York

Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

2018

Five at Nine, Hollis Taggart, New York

Dallas Art Fair, Hollis Taggart, New York

The London Art Fair, Portland Gallery, London

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Of the Past and Present: Estates and Contemporary Artists at Hollis Taggart (New York: Hollis Taggart, 2023).

“Hollis Taggart Southport to Open Parallels: Chloë Lamb and Bill Scott,” Darienite, January 8, 2022, darienite.com/hollistaggart-southport-to-open-parallelschloe-lamb-and-bill-scott-312442.

“Chloë Lamb on Her Exhibition ‘Chloë Lamb: New September,’” Vimeo, September 23, 2020, video, 3:01, vimeo.com/461028879.

Elisa Wouk Almino, “A View from the Easel During Times of Quarantine,” Hyperallergic, April 3, 2020, hyperallergic .com/551593/a-view-from-the-easelduring-times-of-quarantine-2.

Chloë Lamb: New September (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2020).

Color Harmonies: New Paintings by Chloë Lamb (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2017).

This catalogue has been published on the occasion of the exhibition

“Chloë Lamb: Appetite for Color” organized by Hollis Taggart, New York, and presented from September 12–October 12, 2024.

Reproduction of contents prohibited.

Hollis Taggart

521 West 26th Street 1st & 2nd Floors

New York, NY 10001

Tel 212 628 4000

www.hollistaggart.com

Catalogue production: Kara Spellman

Copyediting: Jessie Sentivan

Design: McCall Associates, New York

Photography: Joshua Nefsky, New York

Cover and frontispiece: Spring Must Be on Its Way (detail), 2024, pl. 10

Page 4: Chloë Lamb in her studio, 2024

Page 6: Challenge (detail), 2023, pl. 5

Chloë Lamb: Appetite for Color