Lauren Luloff (b. 1980, Dover, New Hampshire) received her BFA from Pennsylvania State University and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Luloff is known for her paintings on dyed silk, in which landscape, color, pattern, and observations from nature are transformed through an intuitive and highly material process. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Halsey McKay Gallery, Ceysson & Bénétière, and SOCO Gallery. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, T Magazine, Art in America, and Artforum, among others. She lives and works in Maine.

Luloff’s painted silk clothing is an extension of her painting practice, creating another space in which her ideas about color, landscape, and pattern can unfold. Stripe tests made in preparation for clothing often derive from her landscape paintings and from color combinations she encounters in nature. These experiments move fluidly between works, sometimes becoming borders within her paintings, while paintings themselves inform the clothing. The two practices continually feed one another.

Clothing also introduces a different relationship between painting, the body, and the viewer. Luloff is interested in how the front and back of a painted garment can tell different stories about the person wearing it, and she approaches the clothing with a sense of looseness and freedom. While the process remains labor-intensive and time-consuming—particularly in the painting of stripes—the garments allow for a more playful relationship to painting. In this way, the clothing becomes both an extension of her studio practice and a means of freeing it, bringing the intuitive, exploratory qualities of her work into direct relationship with the everyday.