Issuu

ERIN LAWLOR

511 West 22nd Street

515 West 22nd Street

525 West 22nd Street

520 West 21st Street

New York NY 10011

ARCADIA Emily Steer Late summer, arcadia (2025) erupts in energetic bursts of fleshy pink and electric blue. Assertive marks swirl and crash together, revealing rich cadmiums and blacks below the surface. The more time one spends with the painting, the more its intense layers of shadow and light twirl before the eyes. Running across a dual canvas that spans over eight and a half feet in width, split with a subtle but firm line down the center, this is the largest work in Erin Lawlor’s eponymous solo exhibition at the Miles McEnery Gallery. It appears ready to suck viewers into its sumptuous, lively center, as it evokes the complex utopia of arcadia. The British artist’s paintings are loaded with references, many hinted at by individual titles, but they hit the emotional and nervous systems first. I originally visited Lawlor’s industrial East London studio ten years ago, as she was preparing her stirring 2016 solo show onomatopoeia for the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils, Latvia. I was struck at the time by how passionate and romantic her practice was—a love letter to art history, paint, and feeling. At a time when figurative or overtly ironic painting was booming, Lawlor was deeply committed to a sincere abstract practice. A decade later, painting seems to have come full circle, and the artist’s luxurious, cavernous paintings have taken on a prophetic quality. The world has also shifted radically, both globally and personally. Lawlor notes that it is no coincidence that rococo and baroque styles boomed in plague times, and she draws parallels between our current post-Covid world and the move toward intense clashes of light and dark turbulence in contemporary painting. She does not paint directly about her own experience, but the heightened drama of her works and their undeniable heavenly quality has increased since we first met. During the interim, she has supported her son through a heart operation and battled cancer herself.

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, Oil paint on canvas, 70 7/8 x 86 inches (180 x 218.7 cm). Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom.

Installation View of Erin Lawlor’s “divining,” 26 April – 15 June 2025. Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland.

The shockwaves of these experiences are palpable, though Lawlor leaves plenty of space for viewers to bring their own psychological and bodily realities to her work. The paintings become mirrors of both artist and viewer on any given day, reflecting rather than defining the mood. 4

While the works are decidedly abstract, they call to mind a long history of painted turbulent skies. Across the exhibition, tension builds, crashes, and subsides. It is suggestive of a depth that stretches back into the canvas beyond the visible marks. Stormy weather (2025) is the most directly suggestive of this. It features a potent clash of leaden black and powdery blue. The hours (gloaming) (2024) builds to a tempestuous crescendo of magnetic black and red, while light pink highlights seem to float above the surface. Such pieces call to mind the inherent connections between clouded skies and grief that were utilized by John Constable following the death of his wife. Lawlor’s work has changed course over the past twenty years, following grief and seismic upheavals in her personal life. She stepped away from the portraits that had defined her early practice, wanting to find space around the human figures and open something more freeing within landscapes and abstractions. Each body of work evolves from the next, rather than taking a clearly defined new direction. Her recent series follows her divining exhibition at Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda, Ireland. That show referred to her late father’s Irish roots, and her own

Matthew Wong, End of the Day, 2019, Oil on canvas, 80 x 70 1/8 inches (203.2 x 178.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Gift of Monita and Raymond Wong, in memory of their son, Matthew Wong, 2023.

sense of existing between cultures while she was growing up. The Welsh notion of “hiraeth” can be felt through those pieces and is present more broadly in her current practice, which reflects nostalgia for a home or for an imagined ideal that never really existed. Since we first met, Lawlor’s visual language has become more striking. Her paintings are characterized by assured, sweeping brushstrokes that finish abruptly, rather than melting into the surrounding mass. Her inner minimalist, she tells me, is gone, and she has embraced a sometimes-lavish flamboyance. Her works are full of hidden spaces, which are suggestive of entire universes unfolding behind her surface marks, with wormholes opening between different works. She paints quickly, wet on wet, with her canvases laid horizontally on the floor. This adds an urgency and direct feeling of expression. This intuitive way of working is coupled with her deep knowledge of both historical and contemporary painting and her wealth of experience in the studio. Her colors have become mercurial. The blues in particular seem to change and shift, depending on the surrounding works. There is something ghostly about the exhilarating blues that leap from the darkness in new works such as her pleasure (arcadia) (2024) and pomegranate (2025), which, she reflects, may have been influenced by the painter Matthew Wong, who died in 2019 at the age of 35. Wong’s paintings featured landscapes soaked in a trippy array of midnight and azure blues. Lawlor also recalls

Peter Paul Rubens, The Holy Family with Saints Francis and Anne the Infant Saint John the Baptist, early or mid-1630s, Oil on canvas, 69 1/2 x 82 1/2 inches (176.5 x 209.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

visiting David Hockney’s Hockney Paints the Stage exhibition in her youth; she later realized she had been inspired by the immersive nature and vibrant blues of his Ravel’s Garden.

Woven through the effervescent pomegranate is the story of Persephone, the goddess of spring, who was abducted by Hades. Persephone was bound to Hades by the succulent pomegranate seeds he tempted her with; she ended up trapped in the underworld through winter but was allowed to return to her mother during spring and summer. References to myths thread tangentially through other works. The recurring “arcadia” titles reflect on the double-sided role of this natural idyl, in which life and death are inherently bound to one another. This polarity reaches back through art history, with Lawlor’s works touching on Nicolas Poussin’s famous impression of arcadia as a luscious, vibrant garden surrounding a heavy tomb. While Titian is a long-running and immediately visible influence on Lawlor’s works, she has also acknowledged the influence of Peter Paul Rubens’s vertiginous paintings. His multiplicity of spaces within a single work and his break away from fixed-point perspectives resonate in her pieces, which rarely place the viewer on solid ground. In her more intimately scaled works, she offsets the pure drama of her larger canvases with playful bursts and singular marks. With these smaller paintings, the impact of cartoons comes to the fore, in particular the energetic squiggles and puffs that evocatively suggest movement. Early memories of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild

Things Are and Dr. Seuss’s books feed into Lawlor’s broader approach. In afar (2025), she presents a brief moment of action that feels lighter and looser than what we see in her tumultuous large-scale pieces, as a pale but bright blue stroke bounces off lowlights of amber and gray. She has also recently considered the early impact of William Morris prints around her home while she was growing up—a forest of items ungrounded, repeated, and overlapping. This is felt most intensely in her square canvases. They can be disorientating for the viewer, creating a vortex-like feel that throws the mind—and its longing to organize even abstract works into readable landscapes or scenes—into disarray. In the meteorological cloudburst (2025), a mass of marks gathers around a central point, revealing a flash of warm ochre. It feels as though we might be seeing a parting in the heavens, or perhaps a storm brewing that will soon close in on this deeper portal. Whether we are looking forward, up, or down is unclear; the square format creates a sense of floating in an undefined space. These paintings draw us back to the presence of the body, both our own and the artist’s, in relation to the work. While some pieces stretch across multiple panels, the scale of their individual parts is line with the size of a human being. This reflects Lawlor’s physicality, as she works from above and reaches all around the canvas, which is both limited by and expressive of the body. Since Lawlor has wrestled with sickness, the body, its capacities, and its ability to endure are an undeniable aspect of her work. Painting is both an urgent marker of existence in the here and now and a lasting creative mark that can outlive the human form. Her works are an embodiment of herself. In numerous ways, they also reflect a wider feminist position. The paintings deny the singular, dominating, expansive format so rooted in macho abstraction. Lawlor’s work in multiples and groupings of canvases riffs on Silvia Federici’s notion of territory, which connects environmental and bodily struggles, encouraging communal thinking and common ground. Between individual works and between halves of the same piece, there is dialogue rather than the domination of

ideas. In Lawlor’s works, even the binary formats of landscape and portrait are opened up, with both simultaneously existing thanks to the clean line that runs through the center of her diptychs. The viewer is constantly encouraged to keep looking, to keep reading, and to keep untangling. Lawlor’s paintings ultimately feel alive. She paints from the inside out. She doesn’t start with a particular image or tight composition in mind, but she allows the work to unfold naturally and quickly on the canvas. Her marks—variously controlled and explosive when she needs them to be—and her highly attuned approach to color create paintings that work on a multitude of levels, unfurling the history of the medium’s roots (which is at times overwhelming), reveling in its emotional capacity, and building vast universes into which her viewers can freely tumble.

Emily Steer is an arts journalist and trainee psychotherapist based in London.

the hours (gloaming), 2024 Oil on canvas 71 x 47 1/4 inches 180 x 120 cm

as above, 2025 Oil on canvas 55 x 55 inches 140 x 140 cm

cloudburst, 2025 Oil on canvas 55 x 55 inches 140 x 140 cm

dervish, 2025 Oil on canvas 55 x 55 inches 140 x 140 cm

groove, 2025

Oil on canvas 59 1/4 x 39 1/2 inches 151 x 100 cm

hot stuff, 2025 Oil on canvas 59 x 39 1/2 inches 150 x 100 cm

late summer, arcadia, 2025 Oil on canvas 71 x 102 1/4 inches 180 x 260 cm

mooch (broadway), 2025

Oil on canvas 55 x 55 inches 140 x 140 cm

pomegranate, 2025 Oil on canvas 71 x 94 1/2 inches 180 x 240 cm

stormy weather, 2025 Oil on canvas 55 x 55 inches 140 x 140 cm

candy, 2022 Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches 41 x 31 cm

heat, 2023

Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches 41 x 31 cm

summer, 2024 Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches 41 x 31 cm

afar, 2025

Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches 41 x 31 cm

le mepris, 2025 Oil on canvas 15 3/4 x 12 inches 40 x 31 cm

plein soleil, 2025

Oil on canvas 16 x 12 inches 41 x 31 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ERIN LAWLOR 8 January – 14 February 2026 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2026 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2025 Stephen Westfall Photo Credits p. 4: Photo © Tate, London, United Kingdom p. 4: Image courtesy of Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda’s Municipal Art Gallery, Drogheda, Ireland, photo by Ros Kavanaugh p. 5: © 2025 Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York, NY Photo by Alex Yudzon / Cheim & Read, New York, NY Associate Director Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY Peter Mallet, London, United Kingdom Catalogue layout by Allison Leung ISBN: 979-8-3507-5905-1 Cover: stormy weather, (detail), 2025