"Linking Keats, Camus, and Lawlor, rapture within resists death withal. Beauty - art by another name - completes the equation... We are in the realms of poetry, myth and magic, a garden of sorts holding earthly and unearthly delights.” – David Anfam, 2023
Vigo is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Erin Lawlor (b. 1969 in Epping, England).
Across the works, Lawlor dissects and projects with gestural, playful motive the world around her, across its most present and distant threads. Painted later than, and in relation to, the paintings currently on view at Wellington Arch, this body of work moves in lighter, more vibrant circles, with sparser, energetic brushstrokes. Yet they retain all the seasonality of their predecessors, with swirling tones of pink, orange and blue alluding to shifts in temporality, while also recalling the deep referential dialogue the artist has fostered with the history of painting, including figures such as Rubens, Vela?zquez, Goya, and above all Titian.
David Anfam highlights these links in his essay accompanying the forthcoming catalogue on Lawlor’s recent practice: “Cutting-edge contemporary, her work nevertheless has roots as deep and distant as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which being is forever in a state of becoming. Metamorphosis’s flux represents the interface between change and constancy, the one and the many, embodying organic life itself. And if painting lives, as Lawlor’s does, nothing dies.”
