AGE: 33
BASED IN: Los Angeles
“It knocked me out.” That’s how Pace founder Arne Glimcher remembers his first visit to Lauren Quin’s studio. After showing the painter’s manic, neon-tinged abstractions at its downtown offshoot 125 Newbury in 2024, the mega-gallery announced her representation last August, and she’s slated for a solo show takeover of its outpost in Los Angeles opening in January. Quin’s iconography is just as seductive, idiosyncratic, and sprawling as her hometown.
Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.
Sometimes, I will make a painting that sits up and sings for me—where it feels like I am cutting plastic, and the scissors start to glide. Then, there are paintings that torture me. They will take months or years to complete, and every inch is fought for. I prefer the struggle, because it shows me how to make the next five paintings. Cub Cross was one of those paintings—the sum of it is more than its parts.
Imagine someone gives you $150,000 to make anything you want—no strings. What are you making?
I am not being clever when I tell you, I am making what I want already. But, I have a pipe dream to build a sauna gallery in my backyard where people would make an appointment to sweat privately with a show. I would install a J.B. Blunk piece, or something conductive like a Josef Strau aluminum painting. It would serve well for a ceramics show of course, but [Francis] Picabia used to bake his paintings in the oven…
What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?
Theracane, butter knife, boba straws.
What art-world trend would you like to see die out?
I see a lot of paintings right now where I feel like the figure is an excuse for a subject. This doesn’t apply to all figurative paintings, I just think they should get their hands dirty, metaphorically speaking.
Is there a studio rule you live by?
Don’t copy yourself, paint never acts the same way twice. Never ever put your water bottle on the same table as your paint thinner. A line from Rebecca Morris: wake up early and fear death!
Describe your work in three words.
Ready-made luck.
Who are the three people, alive or dead, invited to your dream art-world dinner party?
Only three? Francisco Goya, Joan Mitchell, Jean Dubuffet.
What’s an artwork you didn’t make, but wish you had?
[Gerhard] Richter’s series of paintings on top of photographs. As a whole they feel like a bridge in his career, but I find them to be so simple and perfect. He really made a type of mark with paint that is so singular it can never be used without acknowledging him.
See CULTURED‘s full 2025 Young Artists list and access other individual artist profiles here.
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