Tif Sigfrids is delighted to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Mimi Lauter in our Athens location. The show will open on Saturday, May 14th and remain on view through June 18th. This is Lauter’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The recent paintings by Mimi Lauter call up a particular category of images taken from the world of natural forms as filtered through human perception and memory. For the show we are presented with four canvases and three paintings on paper, each bursting with dabs and slicks of hot pink, red, creamy yellow, and blue rising harmoniously from their surfaces. The deafening use of color is curbed by compositional schemes that are deceptive in their simplicity and intricate details that reveal hidden worlds diffused within each work. The subtle mirroring of shapes around invisible vertical or horizontal axes in Lauter’s paintings recall the symmetricity of the flowers that populate not only the works of her forebearers in painting—Vuillard, Redon, Ensor, and Bonnard—but the garden of her own creation, surrounding the studio in Los Angeles in which she works.

The minor displacements and dissymmetry’s are what make Lauter’s flowers look, both, out of this world and intimately familiar—like figments of bygone fantasies with elements reminiscent of human or animal physiognomies. The outlines of birds, names, concentric dials, and waving hands that Lauter scrabes and scratches into the surfaces of these simultaneously disintegrating and figural tableaus are of a different sort. They are like annotations of thoughts one might have on a second visit, adding a sense of temporal relay to the immediacy of the theater of color.

Mimi Lauter (b. 1982, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA at The University of California, Los Angeles and her MFA from University of California, Irvine. Recent exhibitions include Prospect 5 New Orleans (2021), Symphony No. 1, Blum and Poe, New York (2020), Après nous le déluge, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2019); Selections from the Marciano Collection, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2019); and Sensus Oxynation, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2018). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.