Lauren Gohara
Lauren Gohara received her BFA from Art Center College of Design, her MFA from Hunter College, and studied painting at the Frank Mohr Institute in The Netherlands. She lives and works in New York City.
Visually, my paintings reference hard-edge geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism, minimalism. In fact, they are representational. Based on found graphics and data on income and wealth inequality, and acts of corporate malfeasance, they are landscape paintings of our economic environment. They are portrait paintings of entire populations of people. They are still lives of our financial system. In bold colors, the paintings are attractive, even cheerful, but they reflect an unsettling reality.
In my gouache drawings, figures based on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights casually ignore juxtaposed graphs of rising debt, declining wages, and its human consequences. While the figures in The Garden indulged in pleasurable activities, Bosch warned of an inevitable hell to come.
