Statement
My paintings begin with images that already carry histories: hunting scenes, mythological bodies, animals, flowers, gestures of violence and desire. I draw these fragments from paintings whose visual languages remain strangely alive, then reconstruct them until their inherited hierarchies begin to give way.
I am interested in the point at which an image ceases to hold itself together. Figures emerge and disappear; passages of description collide with abstraction; space opens and abruptly flattens. Recognition is offered but never allowed to settle. Increasingly, I want the construction of the image to remain visible, so that looking becomes an experience of watching something form, persuade, and destabilize itself at once.
Underlying the work is an interest in the persistence of classical images and the structures of authority they continue to carry: desire, possession, beauty, violence. Rather than retelling their histories, I am interested in what survives within their forms, how those forms continue to organize perception, and what becomes possible when their authority is made unstable again.
Bio
Lauren Moses is a painter based in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking and Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA in History from the University of Virginia.
Moses is a 2026-27 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellow and a recipient of the Don Bachardy Fellowship at the Royal Drawing School in London. Her work was selected for New American Paintings South Issue #184, juried by Maria L. Kelly of the High Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include Annely Juda Fine Art, London, and Virginia MOCA. In December 2026 her work will be presented by Main Projects at NADA Miami, followed by a solo exhibition with the gallery in Richmond in February 2027. She has also received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.