Caitlin Lonegan

About the Artist

Born 1982 in Long Island, New York

Caitlin Lonegan’s paintings exhibit a specific kind of abstraction that avoids the grand, one-off gestures of mid-20th-century abstract expressionism. She deliberately refuses allegiance with any formal school or position, stating, “It’s not interesting if you know where the artist is.” Each painting emerges from a series of marks carefully applied up over time. She works on multiple canvases concurrently as the paintings migrate around her studio—from the floor to the wall and back again—sometimes taking over a year to complete.

Constantly evolving her method of application, Lonegan’s current paintings are a marked shift from her previous series, The Mark on the Wall (2012) and the White Page Paintings (2011), which leaned toward dispersing gestures in blank, shallow space. With the dark hues and metallic sheens of her current palette, her newest paintings are earthy and unfathomably deep, and yet still fracture our attention. The eye floats around her canvases as it tries to decipher each mark as the result of a stroke, flood, or spray of paint. These gestures hover, collide, and weave into and around each other, yielding a satisfying disorientation.