Lois Lane

Upstairs

Halsey McKay is pleased to present Ten Minutes Ago, Lois Lane’s first solo exhibition with the gallery organized by Ivy Shapiro and David Kennedy Cutler. The intimate show features three drawings and two paintings. Having explored depictions of mannered femininity across oil on canvas, graphite and collage for over five decades, Lane has developed a unique visual style that remains stridently indifferent to passing aesthetic trends or political fancies; her late-career resurgence represents a long-overdue appreciation of the artist’s inimitable sensibilities.

Born and raised in Philadelphia during the 1950s, Lane’s carefully defined subjective range draws inspiration from the commercial images she absorbed as a child, during a period when femininity was carefully circumscribed and oriented around formal class indicators. Such signifiers, drawn largely from the magazines and melodramas of Lane’s youth, continue to inform her aesthetic insights today, and recur across her career as the subject-matter of an increasingly dark and obscure image-world.

High-heels, knee-length gowns and moonlit estates guide the viewer through Lane’s ghostly visual lexicon. These defamiliarized images are ripped from narrative contexts to become paradigmatic of the artist’s aesthetic concerns. The total effect is an expression of femininity that is both nostalgic and subversive, the deconstruction of a dream world.

Arriving in New York in 1971, after receiving her MFA from the Yale School of Art, Lane’s work premiered in a solo exhibition at Artists Space in 1974 and was regularly exhibited at Willard Gallery throughout the 1970s and 80s. At the forefront of the New Image Painting movement— which injected subjective imagery into painting after decades of painterly jobs abstraction, color field, minimalism and pop— her work appeared in numerous museum exhibitions and her work can be found today in many institutional permanent collections. Lane’s cohort paved the way for the generation of 1980s art stars working in a pictorial vein. Lane has rarely shown since the early 1990s, yet she has been working steadily in her studio in upstate New York. The graphic motifs she established in her propulsive early career have transformed into densely rich and ethereal compositions. Her lifelong commitment her subjects shares Jasper Johns’ predilection for recurrent visual motifs, an attribute she may have observed while assisting Johns in his studio when she was an emerging artist. She also shares a palpable sense of mystery embedded within her work, another attribute found in her former employer’s oeuvre.

The dresses, shoes, houses, fans, animals and plants that comprise Lane’s visual language are fluid enough to adapt to formal conceits derived from color-field painting, hard-edge painting and minimalism. She operates within a palate of blacks and blues and velvety purples, which are compartmentalized by graphic compositions recalling bold gestures by Richard Serra, Mark Rothko or Ellsworth Kelly. Seeking to blaze her own path, Lane has developed a rich body of work that allows her paintings and drawings to contain gestural mark-making, abstracted shapes, iconic imagery and mysterious ethereality.

A point of entry for Lane’s oblique image-world may be through cinema – particularly, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk or Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger. These opulent romance films, marketed to women at the height of the 20th Century, were defined by their attentive fascination with fine material objects, and the swollen (though hardly-spoken) desires of the women who wore or coveted them. Emerging in the years just before the feminist movement radically altered the legal rights and social statuses of women, these films offered a romantic dreamland for a distinctly sheltered perspective, in which the triumph of love was always tempered by a fealty to the whims of the lover, and in which the stakes of not appearing desirable were no less than that of social exile.

In her reliable visual motifs and dark-hued palette, Lane seems to enact the strictures of this world at the twilight of its applicability, returning us to the mannered dress, prim estate and inexorable power of the societal customs that once dictated desire. Within this twilight, Lane’s iconography becomes a portal to a dark and beautiful cosmos.

Lois Lane (born 1948, Philadelphia, Pa.) has worked in painting and drawing for more than 50 years. Lane holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Philadelphia College of Art. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibit with Southfirst Gallery, New York and group exhibitions at The Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, O.H. (American Painting: The Eighties Revisited); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Drawing in The Shape of Shape: Artist’s Choice—Amy Sillman); and Artists Space, New York (Social Surfaces curated by Jay Sanders and Jamie Stevens). Lane lives in New York City and Warwick, N.Y.