LOS ANGELES, CA.- Pace Los Angeles presents an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Quin, on view from January 31 to March 28, 2026. Marking her first solo show with Pace since joining the gallery in 2025, this body of work foregrounds a decisive and self-imposed rupture in Quin’s practice since her 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury in New York.
In these new paintings, produced over the past year and a half, Quin has turned from an “overdose” of chromatic intensity toward what she describes as a “detox of color.” The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Pace Publishing, featuring a new text by the poet, playwright, and essayist Ariana Reines.
Though they may at first appear monochromatic, Quin’s new paintings are anything but monochromes. Dense tonal fields of blacks and greys are haloed by bleachfields of fugitive color, neither fully present nor fully absent. Brilliant hues persist as echoes, sedimented and worked into atmospheres. Quin’s lexicon of “symbols”—a repertoire of forms she has developed over time, which recur across her works—are digested and absorbed. The color feels like the remnant of a stain––faded sepia against flashes of grisaille. Through this reduction, Quin short-circuits the associative, emotional, and referential powers of color.
Formally, Quin’s compositions are assemblages, stitched together from previous bodies of work, temporally fragmented and sutured. In each painting, she collages motifs, symbols, and spatial logics into new unities held taut between stability and collapse. Time binds Quin’s works internally; rather than progressing forward, they loop, re-suture, re-combine. The result is a kind of internal yet inscrutable language that emerges across her oeuvre, an esoteric mode of meaning-making that feels almost mystical. Quin calls this “superstitious abstraction,” an approach guided by the search for moments of synchronicity and serendipity, which then suggest the next step in the chain of formal invention.
Quin begins each composition by laying down a ground composed of what she describes as “sumptuous tunnels of light,” expanding pictorial space with pattern and shape before working against it, “swelling up the space in the painting.” This underpainting functions as a clarifying step—a means, as the artist puts it, of “bringing forward what I needed from the painting.” Layers are then scraped back, exposed, reworked, leaving visible pentimenti that memorialize but also obscure the chain of her decisions. This letting-go is rigorous: to allow the painting to become high-key and chromatic, to coax it back to grayscale, only to allow color to re-enter in altered form. All the works in this exhibition passed through a similar cycle of “detoxification,” governed by this rule-based system of advance and retreat.
The spatial logic of Quin’s paintings is centrifugal and entropic. Tubular structures appear cracked open, their innards spilling outward past the picture plane. In Quin’s masterful command of her medium, the logic of space is itself stretched, split, and held in a state of productive instability. The body is no longer depicted but rather summoned as a series of interwoven surfaces, volumes, and interiors. “There is no body in an assembled way,” Quin says of these works. “I am interested in the body insofar as I am thinking about something as small as the glint of an eye.” The kernel of Quin’s paintings can often lie in such a tiny detail or fragment of everyday life, a piercing shard of sensation stolen from experience. Her paintings are soundings from the unseen spectacle of the minute, from the splendor of what swells into vision before disappearing in a flash, dissolved into the afterglow of memory.
Lauren Quin approaches the act of painting as a process of ongoing inquiry. Her paintings are at once radically intuitive and deeply considered, simultaneously sedimentary and archaeological. Composed from dynamic, intensely chromatic forms, they challenge our understanding of abstraction while exploring the mutability of language and symbol.
