Lauren is trying to tell you something. It’s beneath her fingers as she’s scraping through the hot blue and the noisy shimmer, after she’s made them hang together. They are the ladder she’s climbing towards the only thing that really matters. It’s not a phrase you can say precisely. You can only touch it slightly, like a wing raking water.

It’s a message that’s been with her since she was 7, long of limb and shivering in the pool in Georgia, when a bat skimmed the water before her. How did the water taste to that leather creature? That taste is what she’s after, the plushy nausea surrounding awareness, the nightly antechamber before the void clicks on, when you’re so close to sleep that you’re scarcely realer than a dollar or a patch of careworn cellophane.

There is that swelling just beyond comprehension. She would like to bring it to your attention. She paints it every day, having no alternative–it cradles her completely, and it manifests in everything that she calls to mind. Some distant lover’s distant shoulder. The feeling of a blush crossing the cheek. Cool chrome on the palm. Every memory leads to another. Every exit leads to another labyrinth. She traces the simplicity of being and it looks completely insane.

As it comes out of her, it sustains damage, becoming wrinkled color. She sustains damage as well, becoming more Lauren, not any Lauren but this one in particular. The one who wonders about the temperature of the water in the belly of a bat. It was just there a moment ago, briefly swimming through the chlorinated summer.

Sasha Chapin, Los Angeles, 2021

Opening
Loyal is happy to announce Lauren Quin’s solo exhibition Bat’s Belly. This is the Los Angeles artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, her first being the group exhibition “100!” last summer. This solo also marks her first in Europe and consists of eleven oil paintings installed over two floors of the gallery. Please join us for the opening reception with the artist Thursday June 3 from 6–8 PM. Music will be played in the garden by Femi Frykberg Jah. A catalogue will be published for the exhibition.

Biography
Lauren Quin (b. 1992) lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated with an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019, attended Skowhegan School fo Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 2017, and earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. She has exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Haven, Stockholm, with previous solo exhibitions at Real Pain Fine Arts (Los Angeles), Friends Indeed (San Francisco), and group exhibitions at Smart Objects (Los Angeles), Loyal (Stockholm), Downs and Ross (New York), and Blum and Poe (Los Angeles).