Laura Lancaster makes paintings from found imagery, collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. She transposes the lost and discarded memories of strangers into an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration. Divorced from their specific context and time Lancaster relocates the image to a place of collective memory. Shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque, Lancaster's paintings are uncanny and strange, dreamlike visions from a shared consciousness.
Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws upon a range of influences including the work of Francis Bacon, Willem DeKooning, Lovis Corinth, and James Ensor. Lancaster subverts the notion of authorial autonomy, allowing her work to become a conduit through which the lives of the lost and the nameless are connected with our own.
She has shown her work in solo exhibitions worldwide including: Laura Lancaster: Closer and Further Away, Workplace London; Laura Lancaster, Wooson Gallery, Korea; Running Towards Nothing, Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Shadows and Mirrors, Workplace, London; Laura Lancaster, New Art Gallery Walsall; Shapeshifter, Workplace London, UK; and A Stranger's Dream, Sargent's Daughters, New York. Group Exhibitions include: John Moores Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Paint the Town, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens; 20:20 Twenty Years of Collecting Contemporary Art, New Art Gallery Walsall; Royal Academy Summer Show 2019, London; Woman, MA2 Gallery Tokyo, Japan; Legacy – 50 years of painting in Tees Valley, The Auxilliary, Middlesbrough Portrait Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; ALAC, Two-person presentation at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016, Los Angeles; Dismaland, Weston-super-Mare, UK; Private Utopia, Tokyo Station Gallery, Japan, Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan; Itami City Museum of Art, Japan; Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan;
Lancaster's work is represented in numerous international collections including The British Council Collection; New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Nerman Museum, Kansas, USA; The Government Art Collection, UK and numerous private collections worldwide. Her work has recently been published in Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting by Phaidon Press, and Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins for Thames and Hudson.
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