DECEMBER 3 – 7, 2024
Booth C115 | Ice Palace Studios

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new dyed silk works by artist Lauren Luloff at NADA Miami from December 3rd to 7th at the Ice Palace Studios in booth C115. 

Luloff is known for her paintings created on silk with dye. Over the past several years, she has experimented with hanging methods, compositions, and types of silk, but her commitment to an evolving language of painting remains central throughout her practice. For NADA Miami 2024, Luloff will continue her exploration of form into a larger scale.

Luloff opened her first solo museum exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in September 2024. In preparation, her practice organically shifted to larger works. Luloff pieces together initial shapes of disparate silks into compositions of fluctuating density and transparency, and continues this visual collage with her use of hand painted patterns contrasting open spaces of landscape. Gridded and striped patterns, which began as a form of play or doodling, later became a means to explore color relationships found in nature, and finally, a way to distill the landscape into a more orderly and succinct translation. The highly saturated colors of the pure dyes she uses powerfully contrast the vulnerability of the silk fabric. This dichotomy in her work feels crucial: the juxtaposition of power and frailty, strength and mortality.

In the past year, Luloff began incorporating figures surrounded by or filled in with the landscape of her home into her compositions based on herself, her son, and her husband. Initially, Luloff’s figurative paintings were a reaction to the war abroad in Palestine. The intensity of the war turned her attention to the bodies of her immediate family for a sense of grounding. She imbued her and her son’s bodies and surroundings with stars of David, explosions, red crosses, and black roadways which represent her sense of grief, shame and responsibility, and connection to the horrific deaths in Israel and Palestine. Slowly, Luloff unraveled her literal symbolism and shifted to fill the figures with images of the landscape, colors, and shapes that depict aspects of their feelings and personalities.

Her son, Julian, in recent months, has become her primary focus, with concentrations on the natural environment of Lubec, his silhouette, sense of play in creating his poses, his moods, and notions of gender. He has become a container or shape to explore many ideas of identity. The paintings are portraits of her son and the earth around them, and so much of her own story transposed into his image.

Lauren Luloff (B. 1980)

Lauren Luloff, born 1980, in Dover, New Hampshire, received her MFA from The Milton Avery College of Art, Bard College and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine; Dunes, Portland, Maine; Ceysson and Benetiere, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, New York; Galerie Bernard Ceysson, Luxembourg and Geneva, Switzerland; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; The Hole, New York; and Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy. Notable group exhibitions include Galerie Lelong, New York; CANADA Gallery, New York; Tanya Bonakdar gallery, New York; The Queens Museum, Queens, New York; Marlborough Gallery, Madrid, Spain, and Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy. Her work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Vogue, T Magazine, Art in America, the Huffington Post and the Village Voice among others. She has been awarded residencies by The Bau Institute, in Cassis, France, The Macedonia Institute, in Chatham, New York and DNA Residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Luloff lives and works in Maine.