Matthew Brown is pleased to present Shekhina, an exhibition of new work by Mimi Lauter, which will inaugurate the gallery’s new Los Angeles location. Lauter identifies as a painter despite working primarily with pastel on paper. The pastel is a temporal necessity. Like a gardener with a spiritual tradition haunted by exile, half afraid she will be forced to flee before her seeds sprout, Lauter moves too quickly to paint. Her preferred speed would muck up the symphony of colors so integral to her building of depth, overlay, membrane. Without the intermediary of a brush, her work has a tactile immediacy, reducing her material to pure pigment.
Shekhina is the first body of work created since Lauter left Los Angeles for Petaluma. Tacking monumental pages of paper with cavernous grooves on her studio floor, smashing pastel into clay sculpted to fill the valleys, Lauter has watched this new surrounding landscape transition from all-consuming green to a yellowing, a browning and a golding, pummeled by sharp columns of rain and piercing blues she used to believe only existed in dreams.
Many of these works are literally illustrative, although they are so firmly tied to Lauter’s own personal associations that they register as abstract. Jewish religious tradition functions in a similar way — handled like a metaphor or piece of literature rather than law verbatim. Fierce debate and talmudic interpretation are considered more pious than blind adherence, where questions are the ultimate form of worship to a God who will never give a straightforward answer. For Lauter, this sensibility means repeating yellow triangles as a symbol for sun falling on Earth, hiding Magen Davids as venn diagrams for the overlapping totality of experience and memory. First Rain in Petaluma, the only oil painting in the show, literally references the first time Lauter watched rain fall over the hills in Petaluma, but she pushes the image along a symbolic path by including five columns, like the fingers on a human hand or hamzah. By reducing natural forms to powerful symbols, the mountain becomes the triangle, the arrow, the sun, the Earth and moon become the sphere, the circle. Clouds invert into leaves on a crown, echoing across compositions.
Maybe it is the tactility of working with pastels — something intimately connected to creating with bare hands — that draws Lauter to this type of refracted thinking, fascinated with human cognition around meaning making, the way our own acts of creation link us with the divine. Rather than depicting the landscape itself, Lauter depicts what we do with the landscape, what we make, what we grow, how we choose to give life. The impulse to shape and divide, to lay claim. Her method of working, smearing oil pastel to grip more soft powdery colors, allows Lauter to build up highly charged contrasts, where slivers of line reveal hidden worlds beneath the surface. Through years of practice, Lauter is aware of how pastel moves. There is a directional bent, forcing her to think in a way that is both ahead and behind each action, anticipating spillage and shifting swaths of color.
Lauter’s work is full of solemnity — thick atmospheres, heavy skies, choking ocean water. Shekhina refers to the lowest of ten rungs on the Kabbalistic tree of life, sometimes translated as "dwelling" or "settling," a bridge and a border between the secular and the divine. Kabbalah itself is a more spiritual bent of Judaism, believing that the embodied experience is just as important as the textual. Part of this embodied spirituality involves a belief in the harmony and balance of all things, that "the greatest fall contains the upward flight." Holiness exists in sin, the divine exists within the quotidian. Lauter is firm that one work can never tell the whole story. She manipulates many pages all at once, balancing a range of color and texture with attention to this spiritual duality.
The landscape in Lauter’s work is the totality of simultaneous landscapes co-existing on the same visual plane. There is the literal landscape, the landscape we construct from symbols and associations, the landscape of memory, the landscape of the interior. While Lauter is obsessed with the tradition of Western landscape painting, she sidesteps its origins. With no fixed point of view, her world is defiantly flat, refusing to privilege one mode of perception above another. This idiosyncratic compositional jumbling breaks down hierarchy in favor of harmony, pushing beyond a single horizon line.
— Ruby Zuckerman
Mimi Lauter (b. 1982, San Francisco, USA) lives and works in Petaluma, CA. She received her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine.
Lauter was included in the first Los Angeles Biennial Made in L.A., organized by the Hammer Museum in collaboration with LAXART in 2012. She participated in Prospect.5, New Orleans in 2021.
Select solo exhibitions include Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2026, forthcoming); Barbati, Venice (2025); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2024); White Cube Bermondsey, London (2023); Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); Tif Sigfrids, Athens (2022); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2021); Blum & Poe, New York (2020); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2019); Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2018); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2018); Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2018); Tif Sigfrids, Los Angeles (2017); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2015).
Her work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; He Art Museum, Foshan, China; Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington, Seattle; Santa Barbara Museum, Santa Barbara; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Frederick R Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Tanoto Foundation, Singapore; Wagner Foundation, Boston; and Nixon Collection, London.