Contributed by Sharon Butler / A year ago, Lauren Luloff left Brooklyn for Lubec, a small town in a sparsely populated part of Maine near the Canadian border. Since then, she’s been living in an old house surrounded by untended land, sea views, and wildlife. Given the wealth of natural forms in her new environs, it is a little mysterious – and certainly thought-provoking – that Luloff’s twelve new paintings, on view at Fridman Gallery through July 24, have taken a decisive turn away from organic form, floral patterns, and flowing structure towards compulsive geometric pattern. These paintings seem like a lively fusion of Mondrian’s 1942 painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, Sophie Taueber-Arp’s colorful grid-based textile designs that were recently on view at MoMA, subway mosaics, and domestic tile projects, with more than a dash of Marsden Hartley’s chunky shapes.
Attached to stretchers, the fabrics have a tautness that creates endearingly wobbly edges. The color-play of the dye application and imagery are easier to apprehend, but they still retain a bold abstractness. The labor-intensive process, like tiling a bathroom, is rigorous and meditative. That is not to say that they are somber, subdued, or fussy, but rather that they suggest, appropriately enough, deliberate remove. Perhaps for Luloff, the whirl of the city she inhabited for years, and its complex geometry of streets and structures, have become an ideal container for the wild Maine landscape, capturing both experiences more clearly from a reflective distance.
