NADA Miami 2022

Laura Lancaster’s paintings are drawn from found imagery, collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. She transposes the lost and discarded memories of strangers into an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration, shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque. Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws on a range of influences, including Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lovis Corinth and James Ensor. Subverting notions of authorial autonomy, her work becomes a conduit through which the lives of the lost and nameless are connected with our own.

With its radically blurred figuration and phantasmal painting style, ‘Mirror’ has a hazy quality of unreality: suspended between abstraction and clear representation, the painting’s form seems to echo the ambivalent, paradoxical sense of unreality felt by its subject, as she confronts her reflection. Her face doubly obscured, she partially blends into her environment, her sense of self threatened in the very moment that she confronts it.