Chloë Lamb

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present Appetite for Color, Chloë Lamb’s third solo show with the gallery. In her latest body of work, Lamb takes further her exploration of abstraction and the process of transmuting her scenes of everyday life into joyous, sumptuous compositions. Appetite for Color presents twelve of the artist’s latest paintings and will be on view on the second floor of Hollis Taggart from September 12 through October 12, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, September19, from 5-8PM.

Lamb works in the tradition of twentieth-century colorists and abstract expressionists. Her practice, as highlighted by these new works, is characterized by a lively sensitivity to color and careful attention to the formal possibilities of oil paint. Bathed in rich hues of warm yellows and blues, Lamb’s paintings often filter people, landscapes, and still life compositions through a gestural abstract vocabulary, taking her observations of the world as a departure point rather than as a final image. Eschewing literal representation of objects or places, her works evoke sensations and poetics rather than tangible realities. For Lamb, abstraction is about catching life on the wing and transposing it on canvas without petrifying it.

Compared to previous paintings that have often invoked strong botanical themes, these recent paintings feature more complex, ambiguous compositions that fuse imagery from the natural world with distillations of more abstract sensations. For example, the painting Sherbet Lemon, the artist notes, is like “a sunny, happy day,” where Round and Round radiates the confidence of a “friend who is sure of their journey through life.”

These new works also represent the artist’s ongoing love of exploring color through oil paint and oil sticks. Oil sticks “offer a quite different way of placing color and form to an image,” according to Lamb, and thus lend additional depth and fibrous texture to the layers of opacity and transparency laid down by oil paint. Rather than creating an under-drawing in graphite or diluted paint, Lamb builds her compositions instinctually through improvisational mark-making, without any preconceived idea of how the finished work will look. Lamb’s deep engagement with the multifaceted qualities of oil-based mediums yields works that recall the gestural, expressionist works of Ivon Hitchens, Henri Matisse, and Richard Diebenkorn.

Born in Wiltshire, United Kingdom, Lamb (b. 1960) currently lives and works in Hampshire in the United Kingdom. She has exhibited across the United Kingdom and United States, including solo shows at Portland Gallery in London and Cricket Fine Art in London. In the early 1990s, she attended the Heatherley School of Fine Art and took classes under Robin Child at Lydgate Art Research Center in Wiltshire after working for several years in another unrelated field.

For more information about Chloë Lamb: Appetite for Color, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.