Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Thresholds of A Wave, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Mimi Lauter. This is the artist’s third solo show with Marc Selwyn Fine Art and her first in our new location at 9953 S. Santa Monica Blvd in Beverly Hills. Lauter will be presenting her large scale oil and soft pastel works on paper in the gallery’s main space and her smaller scaled miniatures in the gallery’s project room. Bold layers of color, rich texture, and intricately detailed etching fill the compositions, rewarding the viewer instantly with their lush, heavily labored surfaces.
In Thresholds of A Wave, Lauter returns to a familiar place but with renewed vision and clarity. In this series, the wave acts as a metaphor for the simultaneously sublime and traumatic revolutions of life. Rather than evolving in a singular or climactic crest, Lauter’s narratives investigate repetition, the plurality of events and the retelling or reimagining of stories. As a starting point in this new body of work, Lauter meditates on the evolution of night into day – day into night. Invoking and channeling inspiration from varied sources such as literature, the opera, mythologies and personal narratives, Lauter translates this exploration through the materiality and process of painting.
Lauter has built almost sculptural surfaces with heavily worked layers of thick pastel that are almost encaustic in their application. The material fragility is revealed through the artist’s signature technique of etching into the pastel with fascinatingly detailed precision. Combined with Lauter’s strong use of color, these techniques join in creating complex and rewarding visual narratives that recall the work of Odilon Redon, Edouard Vuillard, and James Ensor.
Mimi Lauter was born in San Francisco in 1982. She received her BA at University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. Her work has recently been acquired by the Hammer Museum, and Lauter was featured in the 2012 iteration of Made in LA, the museum's Los Angeles biennial. She has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Riverside Museum, Hayworth Gallery, Los Angeles, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles, The Room Gallery, UC Irvine, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee. Lauter has been the recipient of the Medici Scholarship Award (2008), The Hans G. and Thordis W. Burkhard Foundation award (2005) and the Elain Krown Klein Scholarship Award (2004).
