STATEMENT
My paintings are based on found graphics and data from online and print media. Appropriated from the financial and business sections of newspapers and economic journals, tweets, and blogs, I transform raw numbers and bland graphics into vivid pictures of increasing income and wealth inequality.
Visually, my paintings reference hard-edge geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism, minimalism. But I see my work as representational. My paintings are data-driven and period-specific rather than transcendent. Beyond self-expressive, they depict what’s happening in the lives of millions of people. They are financial landscapes created out of invisible numbers, depicting an anxious reality that has ongoing social and political consequences.
The income stagnation and burden of rising debt for the vast majority of us, in the face of astonishing growth in wealth for a few, are our financial reality. Yet most people feel these imbalances only vaguely, unaware of their magnitude and worsening over time. Hard data, transformed in scale and color, become abstract portraits illuminating our wildly skewed economic situation. In my paintings, the imbalances are made tangibly visible.
BIOGRAPHY
Lauren Gohara’s work has been in numerous exhibitions, including most recently at Touchstone Gallery in DC, the Katonah Museum of Art, Site:Brooklyn, the Cluster Gallery in Brooklyn, and The Windows at Kimmel Galleries at New York University. She has had solo exhibitions of her work at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, and at the New Arts Program and Northampton Community College, both in Pennsylvania. She is a recipient of a BRIO grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and was a recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation Studio Program Award from 1999-2018. Her work is in numerous private collections, as well as in the collection of the U.S. State Department, which acquired a group of 22 paintings for the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria. Gohara received her BFA from Art Center College of Design, and her MFA from Hunter College. She studied painting for an additional year at the Frank Mohr Institute in The Netherlands. She lives and works in New York City.