Josh Lilley is proud to present Engagements, LA-based painter Erica Mahinay’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first presentation in the UK.
Mahinay’s compositions oscillate between architectural and ephemeral, their personality solid but their forms aqueous. Mahinay achieves this duality through a process that incorporates a highly technical tool box alongside an intuitive and sincere formal relationship to a given work’s becoming. This is then a practice capable of operating in the nuances between different painting speeds and modes of intensity, moving from meditative to frenetic as the need arises; sometimes leading the painting, and sometimes being led.
Mahinay’s underpainting progresses at a brisk and intuitive pace, as she establishes the foundational tones of each piece, rapidly forming in-roads and points of connection with her creations. She develops the agency of a work, its presence in the studio initiated through a dynamic accretion and subtraction, where pigment is layered and wiped away, resulting in a luminescent skin, a bedrock of optical colour that appears to glow beneath the surface. This is followed by a more gradual, contemplative dialogue as a composition evolves, a call and response method of mark making in the pursuit of illusionistic space. These marks can be made with a brush or roller, by dripping or pouring, scrawling with an oil stick or dry pigment tossed onto wet surfaces, but they predominantly derive from the artist’s hands, her fingers on and within the plane of each engagement.
What emerges from this process are paintings of distinct character, each utilising a unique ratio of materials and motion, colour and light. This is testimony to the physicality imbued within Mahinay’s work, an inherent body language that begins at the fingertips, but emanates out into a shimmering mass of gestural expression and exploration.
Erica Mahinay (b. 1986, Santa Fe) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, US and her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City. Mahinay has had recent solo exhibitions at T293, Rome; Lyles and King, New York and F&deO, Madrid. Recent group exhibitions include Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LA Dreams 3 Light Touch, CFHILL, Stockholm; What Dreams May Come, Make Room, Los Angeles and Once the Block is Carved, There Will Be Names, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels.
