Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Los Angeles based painter, Caitlin Lonegan. “Points of View” presents a new series of paintings begun in 2015 and completed in 2018. Each painting in this body of work is an exploration of flickering light, mutable color, and shifting spatial relationships.

In her studio and in exhibitions of her work, Lonegan is interested in cultivating an experience that is always engaged with discovery and surprise; her work shares an ongoing investigation of her own perception and the instability of meaning. She paints in an abstract language that appears loose, a style with ingrained references to modernism. Despite the appearance of an intuitive approach, Lonegan’s practice is time-intensive: she moves between paper and several canvases and panels at once, considering how a mark made here has a profoundly different affect than a mark made there; how the viewer’s perception of a reflective pigment, for example, changes with context. This considered approach to composition allows the artist to combine ephemeral or disparate ideas in a single composition and across an entire group of works.

When she began working on the paintings that compose “Points of View,” Lonegan quickly realized that each painting was emerging from a memory of a specific light effect, probably reflections off a car’s windshield, projecting through the security screen door and barred windows of her studio in Glendale, CA. The movement of light through these various imperfect lenses created a rapid succession of new images of a familiar place where multiple perceptions of color and space existed nearly simultaneously. Lonegan used this potent sensory experience, combined with strategies gleaned from literary and visual sources, where the authors or visual artists used shifts in point of view, from fact to fiction, or poetry to prose, to develop a rational system and set of parameters that determine gesture, color, and material in the paintings. While this system is not necessarily visible in the resulting works, Lonegan has left clues in the form of colors and gestures that repeat and mutate depending on from where and in what space or light conditions they are viewed.

In the summer of 2018, Lonegan’s first monograph will be released. Titled For Dorothea, the catalog documents the full trajectory of her last body of work created between 2012 – 2014, including her sketches on paper. In late June, Lonegan will open a solo exhibition featuring additional works from “Points of View” at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna. Another forthcoming solo project in 2018 include an offsite project with Tif Sigfrids (based in Athens, GA). Previously, Lonegan has had two solo exhibitions with ACME in Los Angeles, CA. She has also been included in several group exhibitions including “Abstraction Now!” at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; “Made in LA 2014,” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and “Wake up Early Fear Death” curated by Phillip Kaiser at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna. Caitlin Lonegan received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010 and a BA from Yale University in 2005.