Artist to Watch: Laurie Nye Explores Place, Light, and Landscape in Luminous Paintings

The luminous, mesmerizing paintings of Laurie Nye are centered on notions of place, light, and the landscape. “I talk about all other themes through that subject matter,” says the Memphis-born, Los Angeles artist. The CalArts MFA graduate has quietly built a steady following for her dazzling, tapestry-like canvases that hover in a space between direct observation, myth, and subconscious memory.

Now, after a transformative three-month fellowship in New Mexico, Nye is making her highly anticipated New York solo debut with Uffner & Liu gallery in the city’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Titled “The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You,” a nod to the Southern Gothic poet Frank Stanford, the exhibition marks a major career milestone, following two sold-out solo shows in 2024 and 2025 with Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Nye’s distinct artistic vocabulary draws from the compressed, pattern-filled compositions of Les Nabis painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, with the graphic framing of Hiroshige’s Japanese woodblock prints. “My background in silk painting for textiles gave me a muscle memory: I would create patterns by fitting interconnected areas filled with dye side by side, resulting in a shared, flattened pictorial space rather than deep perspective.”

In a new work, The Magic Flute (2026), inspired by the Mozart opera, three owls representing her close friends perch on a branch within a stylized forest. In another canvas, a craggy tree discovered during an isolated period in New Mexico serves as both a “lover and muse,” bathed in a soft, golden light. Instead of painting landscapes based on observation, the artist pulls images from her mind’s eye, resulting in a beautiful, dreamy quality that’s hard to place.

In an increasingly digital and AI-dominated era, Nye views her tactile studio practice as a powerful reminder to appreciate the handmade—an ode to connection and catharsis through art. Standing in front of her radiant works, the viewer is invited to escape into the serene, otherworldly sanctuary the artist has conjured. “The show captures a collective feeling—that shared struggle and determination to push past this current moment and create something that saves us all,” she says. “I want people to have a sense of time travel, to be pulled out of their present moment and into another space. More than anything, I hope it inspires people to be creative, to look at the world differently, and to slow down.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2026 Late Fall Issue under the headline “Narrative Hook” Subscribe to the magazine.