ABOUT

Lauren Krasnoff’s work references memory, art history, pop culture, and contemporary trends. She sees making art as her way of contending with the over-saturation of imagery and media we experience on a daily basis. Lauren uses paint to materialize "snapshots" of the mundane yet important people, places, and experiences in her life which she feels exceed the representational limits of the photo. Fascinated by her generation’s obsession with representing their lives through images, she wants to encapsulate her own life in paint as an earnest depiction of her experiences.

Her compositions begin as preliminary drawings which she eventually scales up. She creates invented perspectives and an economy of mark making in order to emphasize her intentional move away from photographic reference material. Lauren builds the spaces she imagines by pouring paint and moving it around with rags or large brushes. She treats oil paint as a drawing tool, wiping it away with q-tips or scratching lines into thicker areas with the back end of her brush. She takes a linear approach to form in which formal uses of line are woven into painting.

“I’ve always been interested in depicting groups of people, filling spaces with bodies, and exploring interaction. Most recently I’ve been making paintings that depict crowds of sports fans. Sports and fine art are cultural phenomenons that don’t always go hand in hand, and yet I’ve found myself at the intersection of the two. These paintings are about my own love of sports and also the abstraction that happens when painting a crowd of bodies. I grew up in a household where sports were everything. I loved memorizing statistics and history and following my teams in an almost religious manner that positioned myself as part of a larger community of fans. When I was fifteen I attended an event at MetLife stadium where I met Giants punter Steve Weatherford. At the time my main hobbies consisted of watching sports and making paintings of my favorite athletes playing sports, so I brought along a small painting that I had made of Weatherford in hopes of having him sign it. Not only did I get the autograph, but he asked if I’d make a larger painting for him to hang in his home and invited my family and I to bring the painting to him on the sidelines of training camp practice. There I met some of the other players and their families, and my sports art business quickly grew. My work has always dealt with the figure, more specifically multiple figures convening in space. Painting crowds of sports fans allows me to depict something I love and engage in the material exploration that I enjoy most about painting. I am focusing on formal qualities like the color, form, texture, and brushstrokes that make up each landscape of bodies and capture the energy and connectivity of the crowd.”

-Lauren Krasnoff-

Lauren received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts and is based in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her work has been shown at the Newark Museum of Art, New Jersey State Museum, and Bokeh Show in Chelsea, NY. She has also curated exhibitions at Mason Gross Galleries and Rutgers University.

laurenkrasnoff.com