Artist to Watch: Lauren Quin’s Latest Kaleidoscopic Abstractions Reveal a Dramatic Shift in Palette
The Los Angeles-based painter’s work is currently on view in her first solo show with Pace
When Lauren Quin joined Pace last year, it coincided with a significant turning point for the Los Angeles painter. Her densely layered abstractions had been steadily gaining critical attention, often for their vibrant chromatic intensity. Already, the artist was rethinking how her oeuvre was defined. “I started to feel that the reception was prescriptive and based on my color sense, which I didn’t feel aligned with,” she says. “Sometimes, I find it useful to work against how I’m being read. I wanted a detox of color.”
The culmination of this shift is on view at Pace Los Angeles in Quin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. For the show “Eyelets of Alkaline,” on display through March 28, the artist pared her palette back to dense fields of blacks and grays punctuated by faint halos and bleach-like residues of purples, blues, and yellows. Indeed, she didn’t abandon color entirely, but the kaleidoscopic hues that came to be her signature are noticeably restrained. Now colors linger as echoes, revealing atmospheres built from pigment and hints of grisaille. Tubular motifs recur and recombine, obscuring images such as body parts that are unrecognizable under thick accumulations of paint.
For Quin, the exercise of removing pigment was a way to better understand her own process. “I began to wonder if I had acclimated to the intensity of color,” she says. “I wanted to see if I were to eliminate it, what would be left? Would it pull forward what I need from the paintings as I make them?”
In doing so, Quin allows the layers and treatment of the composition to take a starring role. Beginning each painting with a “scaffolding of a challenge,” as she explains it, but without a distinct plan, she modifies or re-creates previous editions, smearing and carving into layers. Forms like tubes and cymbals crack open and spill outward, destabilizing the picture plane. “It’s like a tunnel holding light and a needle poking out,” Quin says. “When I find both and when I learn something from the painting, it’s finished.”
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Spring Issue in the section “Artists to Watch.” Subscribe to the magazine.