Erin Lawlor

ERIN LAWLOR

ERIN LAWLOR

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

ERIN LAWLOR: THE FOLD

By Zoë Miller

The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.1 —Gilles Deleuze, Foucault

Erin Lawlor paints in folds of color. Working in oil paint, wet on wet, she builds layers of looping strokes that fold in, one upon another. The planes of color interact, working together and against each other, insinuating depth. The interiority of her works gives a sense of intimacy—folds of knowledge, experience, memory. Folding is itself a gesture of memory, a turning of the outside in.

The fluid movement of Lawlor’s brush marks generates an interior rhythm that suggests form and shadow but resists figuration. Her paintings are open works.

This quality does not imply indeterminacy, but multivalence. Each viewer plays an active role in their own experiences of the paintings and in their determinations of their meaning.

The notion of enfolding, turning outside in, is emphasised in Lawlor’s large-scale works painted on multiple panels. These recall the classical diptych or triptych: typically hinged together to enable a folding in and an opening out.

Lawlor is deeply engaged intellectually. Her work is steeped in theory and philosophy, and this dual sense of enfoldment and openness resonates with philosophical and quantum mechanical understandings of the potential of the fold. For Gilles Deleuze, “the world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections,”2 folds of space, movement, time. And the fold itself is “a unity that 1. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 2006), p.39.

2. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London, Athlone Press, 1993), p. 24.

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envelops a multiplicity.”3 The fold is a form of connection that is open-ended and inexhaustive; it signifies the multiplicity (twofold, threefold, hundredfold) of meaning and ideas.

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Lawlor talks about her paintings in terms of wholeness and coherence, referencing the work of the theoretical physicist David Bohm, whose 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order builds upon the notion of time and space folding together and into one another. Bohm suggests that beyond material appearance—what he zig, 2017 calls the unfolded explicate order—lies an Oil on canvas; 12 x 10 inches 30.5 x 25.4 cm enfolded implicate order. The implicate order is a deeper dimension of reality, a holistic cosmic view that refers to something beyond matter, acknowledging that reality is more complex than we can articulate. This concern with wholeness enables the paradoxical possibility of finite representations of infinity: The whole is implicit in the part within the “unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders.”4 Lawlor’s depiction of folds eschews figuration.

This avoidance in itself is a gesture of enfoldment, an internalization of form, which leaves open the possibility of meaning. The fold, the “infinite line of inflection,”5 represents the ontological possibility of becoming.

While Lawlor’s early work was largely figurative, over the last ten years she has developed a distinctive nonrepresentational visual language. It is a vernacular of enfolding, expressed in whorls of color that ribbon across the canvas. The gestural strokes are at once reasoned and intuitive, studied and natural, demonstrating a command of the formal properties of color and tone, and an intimate connection with the work. Lawlor initially worked in a muted palette.

Her recent work engages a broader chromatic range. We see this when we look at the rich orange of zig, or the juxtaposed blue and red of shuffle. And yet, pointing to individual properties of color or line or gesture feels 3. Ibid, p. 25.

4. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980), p. 218.

5. Deleuze, The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque, p. 39.

inadequate: Lawlor’s works are immersive pieces. They aspire to cohere and coalesce. As Lawlor says, “My lines are my forms are my colors.”

Although now based in London, Lawlor lived for many years in France, where she gained a degree in art history at Paris-Sorbonne University. And her work, while unequivocally contemporary, is imbued with an historical sensibility.

The sweeping, circular composition of as below recalls Tintoretto’s ceiling paintings; the glowing reds and fleshy suggestiveness of pull + ebb echo Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, and Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox; morning rises evokes a kind of Flemish moodiness. There is a clear dialogue with European traditions of color and light. Lawlor’s loops and swirls enfold the palette of classical painting.

The creation of these works is intensely physical; each documents the relationship of artist to canvas. Lawlor’s working process is an interplay of freedom and limitation. Her work is enabled and shaped by the contingencies of its production: of physical reach, of time, and of temperature. She paints with the canvas laid on the studio floor, ranging from small scale to as large as her reach allows. She works within the limited window of time allowed by the drying paint. In the configuration of artist to canvas, and the immersive physicality of the practice, Lawlor’s working methods draw ready comparisons with action painters, Jackson Pollock in particular; the sweeping brush marks are punctuated by occasional droplets of paint, evidence of her presence above the canvas. The sense of push and pull between artistic impulse and physical parameters bears a strong affinity with Carolee Schneemann’s Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76), in which painting becomes a record of movement and an accumulation of gesture. Schneemann described her body becoming “the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body’s energy in motion,”6 referencing the performative and temporal aspects of the act of painting.

Lawlor’s work, like Schneemann’s, bears these vestigial traces of gesture and boundedness.

Lawlor has said she works in four dimensions. For her, painting is at once space and volume, shape and time.7 The question of time is essential and complex in her work in the sense of both representation and record: chromatic folds 6. Carolee Schneemann, “Up to and Including Her Limits.” http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/works.html.

7. Erin Lawlor, “Dialogue 2012, Internal Form. Interview with Francoise Calle,” in Erin Lawlor: onomatopoeia (Daugavpils, Latvia: Mark Rothko Art Centre), p. 11.

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reference the quantum notions of enfolded space and time, while the visibility and interaction of layer upon layer documents the window of time in which the work was created, painting wet into wet. The point at which a work is finished is informed by the interaction between the planes of color, and the drying of paint.

Lawlor lets the paintings come alive themselves. A work is finished, she says, when it begins to assert itself. The layers of paint drip and trickle over the sides of the canvas, creating a record of the work itself. zip, 2018 The edges document in strata an Oil on canvas; 12 x 10 inches 30.5 x 25.4 cm additional level of temporal narrative.

Rather than capturing an instant, these paintings capture the holistic circumstances of their creation.

Lawlor’s practice is conceptually aligned with radical painting, a movement focused on the potentiality rather than the materiality of painting. The central tenet of radical painting, proposed by Günter Umberg and Joseph Marioni in the 1986 text “Outside the Cartouche,” is an understanding of painting as the root source, “concerned with the essence of painting itself rather than with cultural meaning and the sociological circumstances that surround its production.”8 Radical painting differentiates picture from painting; it is concerned with the painting as such. While the works in this exhibition differ visually from the monochrome canvases of Umberg or Marioni, they share this concern with painting “as the thing itself,” and the aspiration to something further than language, to render a space beyond words. A work like fox’s wedding conjures the singular and private immersive experience of pure feeling that radical painting promises; the viewer is swept up in its fluidity and chromatic richness. This immersive quality, however, does not diminish with the scale of the work. In zip and zig, the eye travels to the edge of the canvas only to be enfolded once again in planes of color and lines of inflection.

8. Günter Umberg and Joseph Marioni, Outside the Cartouche, (Nuremberg, Germany: Neue Kunst Verlag, 1986), p. 17.

To understand Lawlor’s work, it is essential to recognize the incommensurability of language and experience. A recent solo exhibition at the Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia, was entitled onomatopoeia, referencing the reaching beyond language for intuitive meaning. Umberg and Marioni contend that meaning is located in experience and copresence, in the dialogue between viewer and object: “A painting can only be defined insofar as it coincides with the possibility of its being known.”9 Viewers provide their own interpretations, generate their own meanings. Informed by this view, Lawlor had previously resisted giving titles to her works, preferring to avoid framing the viewer’s experience. She now sees titles as “meeting halfway,” a point of entry into the work as well as a point of departure for the viewers’ own readings. Titles like zig, shuffle, and as below suggest mood rather than form or meaning, ensuring that these works remain open to the possibilities of interpretation they enfold. Deleuze describes the fold as the “topology of thought.”10 By eschewing figuration and reaching for something beyond expression, Lawlor’s work avoids reducing thought and sensation to representational language.

The location of meaning in presence and experience recalls (once again) the notion of openness and the implicate order. Bohm speaks of the manifest explicate and the subtle implicate—Lawlor is drawn to this notion of a pervasive and holistic implicate order. The Latin origin of “subtle” means “finely woven,” and Bohm describes the implicate order as a net of consciousness that captures meaning and sensation that cannot be apprehended by the explicate. Subtlety in this sense entails a richness and layering of meaning and of nuance: rarefied, elusive, and intangible. Lawlor has said that her work “doesn’t deliver itself up immediately.”11 Her paintings reward sustained contemplation with their indefinite capacity to reveal what they enfold.

Zoë Miller is an interdisciplinary researcher based in London. She is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Tate Modern and is part of the EU research initiative New Approaches in the Conservation of Contemporary Art (NACCA).

9. Ibid, p. 18.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 118.

11. Erin Lawlor, Dialogue 2012, p. 12.

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aeolius, 2018

Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 5/8 inches 90 x 70 cm

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speedy-t, 2017/18 Oil on canvas 35 3/8 x 27 5/8 inches 90 x 70 cm

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montauk, 2018 Oil on canvas 51 1/8 x 35 3/8 inches 130 x 90 cm

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the dreaming I, 2018

Oil on canvas 51 1/8 x 35 3/8 inches 130 x 90 cm

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loki’s day, 2019 Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

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trickster, 2019

Oil on canvas 59 x 39 3/8 inches 150 x 100 cm

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fox’s bride, 2018 Oil on canvas 59 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches 151.1 x 100.3 cm

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shuffle, 2018 Oil on canvas 59 1/2 x 39 1/2 inches 151.1 x 100.3 cm

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morning rises, 2018 Oil on canvas 71 x 51 inches 180.3 x 129.5 cm

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silver screen/life on mars, 2019

Oil on canvas 70 7/8 x 51 1/8 inches 180 x 130 cm

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coyote/laugh, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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three white leopards, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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world-tree/day, 2019

Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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world-tree/night, 2019

Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

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fox’s wedding, 2018 Oil on canvas 79 x 63 inches 200.7 x 160 cm

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as below, 2018 Oil on canvas 71 x 102 inches 180.3 x 129.5 cm

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pull + ebb, 2018 Oil on canvas 71 x 102 inches 180.3 x 129.5 cm

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night garden/flight, 2018

Oil on canvas 74 3/4 x 153 1/2 inches 190 x 390 cm

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ERIN LAWLOR Born in Epping, United Kingdom in 1969 Lives and works in London, United Kingdom

EDUCATION 1992 BA, University of Paris IV – La Sorbonne, Paris, France

2013 “Recent Paintings,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2012 “Recent Paintings,” George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Anima,” Espace Mezcla, Rouen, France “Erin Lawlor,” Knott Gallery, Brussels, Belgium 2010 “Peintures,” Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, Paris, France

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

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2018 “Cat on the raz,” Espacio Valverde, Madrid, Spain “Hiraeth,” Fox/Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia “Erin Lawlor,” Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand “Here to the Hidden Hills,” Fifi Projects, San Pedro, Mexico 2017 “Erin Lawlor, onomatopoeia,” Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia 2016 “New Works,” La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA “Erin Lawlor,” Rod Barton, Brussels, Belgium “Maleri.Nu/Paint.Now,” Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark 2015 “Opening Scene,” Galerie Klaus Braun, Stuttgart, Germany “Four Paintings: London Fields,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2014 “Long Loud Silence,” Gray Contemporary, Houston, TX

GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2019 “Wet Wet Wet: Erin Lawlor/Aida Tomescu/Liat Yossifor,” Fox/Jensen/McCrory Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand Space K, Seoul, South Korea 2018 “A Brief History of Abstraction,” Rønnebæksholm, Denmark “L’Echappée Belle, Erin Lawlor/Bram van Velde,” Galerie Pauline Pavec, Paris, France 2017 “Drei Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart” Institut français, Mainz, Germany 2016 “Whitfield Street,” Rod Barton, London, United Kingdom “Bête Noire/Candyman,” The Neutra Museum, Los Angeles, CA “David Achenbach Projects,” COFA Contemporary, Cologne, Germany “A full open hand, drippings, and carefully masked lines,” Galleri Jacob Bjørn, Aarhus, Denmark “Thru the rabbit hole,” Sideshow Nation, New York, NY

2015 “White Album,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “The seed of its opposite,” Kelvin College, Glasgow, United Kingdom “Seven Painters,” Arcade Gallery, Cardiff, United Kingdom “Peer Review,” Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom “Erin Lawlor/James Geccelli,” Raumx Project Space, London, United Kingdom “Making History,” Storefront Ten Eyck, Brooklyn, NY “Tutti Frutti,” Turps Gallery, London, United Kingdom “Suchness/Sosein,” RAUMX Project Space, London, United Kingdom “Arbeiten auf Papier,” Galerie Klaus Braun, Stuttgart, Germany 2014 “Ellipse, a Partial Inventory from the West,” A3 Gallery, Moscow, Russia “Women and the Dune,” George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA “Off Line On Mark,” Parallel Art Space, Ridgewood, NY “Mind the Gap,”Autonomie Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Nothing but good live,” Park Platform for Visual Arts, Tilburg, The Netherlands 2013 “Ausklang und Auftakt,” Corona Unger Gallery, Bremen, Germany “The Nature of Abstraction,” Peter Blake Gallery, Laguna Beach, CA “Reason and Romance,” 6b Gallery, Elingen, Belgium “What I like about you,” Parallel Art Space, New York, NY “Emergence,” Hotel de Sauroy, Paris, France 2012 “Turbulence,” George Lawson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA “Moveable Feast,” Hotel de Sauroy, Paris, France 2011 “Jeune Création,” Paris, France “Jérémy Chabaud et Erin Lawlor,” Centre d’art Le Bois aux Moines, Lavaré, France

RESIDENCIES 2017 La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA 2016 Painting Symposium and Residency, Mark Rothko Art Centre, Daugavpils, Latvia La Brea Studio Residency, Los Angeles, CA

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ERIN LAWLOR 11 July – 16 August 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2019 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2019 Zoë Miller

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Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Image page 44 © Kelly Lawlor, London, United Kingdom Color separations by Echelon, Santa Monica, CA Catalogue layout by McCall Associates, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-14-4 Cover: pull + ebb (detail), 2018

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY