Los Angeles–based painter Lauren Quin has joined the roster at Pace Gallery. Quin, who previously showed with dealer Tim Blum before he shuttered his gallery earlier this summer, will have her first exhibition at Pace’s Los Angeles space in 2026, as well as having work in the gallery’s booth at Frieze Seoul next month.
Quin is known for her densely layered abstractions that jump between frenetic mark-making and eerie calm. Since receiving her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019, Quin’s career has been on a rapid ascent, having her first show with Blum & Poe in 2022. Her paintings are owned by major institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
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Quin’s market has also experienced highs and lows. Her 2019 painting Ulter Bearing has come to auction three times since its original sale. It failed to sell at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction in 2022, then sold for $178,000 later in 2022, and finally netted only $22,000 when it sold at Sotheby’s London last fall, according to a report by Artnet News. Her auction record, achieved in 2022, currently stands at $587,452.
Pace founder Arne Glimcher has been a fan of Quin’s work for years, having first visited her studio years ago prior to her Blum & Poe show. In 2024, he gave Quin a solo show at 125 Newbury, his Pace-affiliated space in Tribeca. Glimcher has written that Quin’s paintings “knocked me out by their power, intensity, and ravishing beauty… like storms harnessed at the moment of exquisite danger.”
“He’s been there for me at every point,” Quin said of Glimcher in an interview with ARTnews. “Not just with opportunities, but with advice—most of it about staying focused, staying in the work. That relationship has grown over time, and I really trust him.”
Presented in two parts, the 125 Newbury show, which marked Quin’s first solo show in New York, captured her evolving vocabulary: carved paint fissures, buried monoprints, and symbol-rich abstractions in what she called a “fugue state”—a dissociative visual language meant to disrupt clarity and resist easy interpretation.
“I think since the Newbury show my work has come into a different space,” Quin said. “There’s a different kind of handling of the paint, a different kind of reach. It’s always the same thread, but I’m chasing something else now.”
Speaking of her work currently in progress, Quin said, “I really have had a turning point in the last year or so since the Newbury show. You have to keep the rope taut and I have. I’m so excited to put this work out there, especially in Los Angeles—LA is my home turf.”