Mimi Lauter Book Launch & Signing

The first comprehensive monograph devoted to Mimi Lauter’s work, this elegantly linen-bound hardcover offers an immersive exploration of the artist's distinctive creative process and vividly dynamic body of work. The catalogue spans Lauter's career, packed with rich colors and swirling textures, showcasing her visceral works created primarily in oil and soft pastels on paper. Alongside these works, intimate photographs of Lauter's home studio and garden invite readers into her universe. Lauter refers to her garden as an "ongoing, constantly changing epic mural" that deeply informs her palette and compositions. This monograph includes a text by Los Angeles-based writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer and an essay by LACMA Contemporary Art curator Diana Nawi, offering an in-depth understanding of Lauter’s artistic vision and evolution.

Mimi Lauter (b. 1982, San Francisco, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in oil and soft-pastel. Channeling the natural world, influenced by painting’s rich history, and investigating the human spirit—its complexities and inherently elusive nature—Lauter examines the intimate, the existential, and the transcendent. Her practice proposes a secular relationship to spirituality in painting—belief in and devotion to the painting itself. Imagery of flowers, vases, the four elements, and other instances of iconography are meant to conjure the history of painting as well as the temporal. For Lauter, landscapes are a method by which to parse our journey on this planet, the heaviness of existence, and mortality. A number of the artist’s works point to the tradition of still-life painting, implicating interior and psychological spaces. Lauter is informed and influenced by artists such as Odilon Redon, Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Max Ernst, Louise Bourgeois, Florine Stettheimer, as well as members of the Nabis and Post-Impressionists, who impress upon the aesthetic foundation of her work.

Lauter received her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. In 2012, Lauter was included in the first Los Angeles Biennial Made in L.A. 2012 organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART. Recent institutional presentations include the Kasteel Wijlre Estate, Netherlands (2022); Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2022); and participation in Prospect.5, New Orleans, LA (2021). Her work is represented in the collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington, Seattle, WA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.

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