Lauren Pelc-McArthur
Superadd

May 26 to July 3, 2021

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Superadd, a collection of paintings from Lauren Pelc-McArthur’s ongoing series Normal Paintings. This series explores her relationship to painting as a practitioner and as a voracious consumer of painted images, primarily through screens. Pelc-McArthur wants to find paintings within a fog of noise. As a formal starting point for the works, she represents the mental image of thousands of paintings seen over time as a haze of iridescent, acrylic brushstrokes. Following this process, in the spirit of surrealism, she intuitively pushes the painting into the direction of a pictorial image through layers and strokes of oil paint. The resulting painted images veer in the direction of biomorphic forms while still retaining an attachment to abstract painting. The works within Superadd represent painting in dialog with different time periods, superimposed as cacophonic gestures and visual rhythms that belong everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Based in Montréal (QC), Lauren Pelc-McArthur works on multiple series of paintings simultaneously and unified by a compulsion to break & play with the confines of style. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing And Painting from Ontario College of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States. She was nominated for the 2018 RBC Prize for Painting and the 2019 recipient of the Nancy Petry Award. Her practice has been funded by multiple granting bodies, most recently the Canada Council for the Arts.