Do vultures get a bad rap? Plutarch thought so. “Vultures are the most righteous of birds,” he wrote. “They do not attack even the smallest living creature.” It could be argued that artists, by nature, are vultures, too, consuming the carrion of the human experience and spitting it back out to the world for deeper examination.
The Los Angeles–based painter Lauren Quin has been interested in vultures for years. Though her densely layered abstractions are certainly fodder for the culture vultures of the international art world—at 30, she already has several works in the public collections of international museums, including the Hirshhorn, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Walker Art Center—she’s more intrigued by how her paintings might themselves be scavengers. This was especially true while she was making a new body of work for Salon Real, her second solo show with Blum & Poe, which opened July 5th at the gallery’s Tokyo outpost.
Read more in Artsy.