Dana Lok

Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York

In Dana Lok’s intricate figurative paintings, visual transformations coupled with unexpected and often counter-intuitive vantage points tease at the seams of how signs and representations express meaning. Each distinct body of work engages a range of specific ideas or problemsas they undergo a translation from language to visualization, with the paintings recording all the distortions, spontaneous slippages, and sleight-of-hand substitutions at play to bridge the gulf between thought and image. Lok’s paintings stage a heightened and at times surreal drama of compositional space in which different modes of knowledge and meaning-making are both props and actor, theater set and subject. Threading delicate tensions between signifiers, images in Lok’s work gesture to their absent opposites, hidden in the shadows or just out of frame. Like a magician’s trick, optical cues abound, distracting the viewer while subtly pointing to the fact that there is always more going on than meets the eye. Lok first emerged as an abstract painter before turning to figuration and developing her distinctive style in which enigmatic questions addressing the passage of time or the act of seeing, for instance, are afforded imaginative, incisive answers. Complex and morphing systems of insight are made visible while never wholly transparent. These half-offered, half-withheld solutions hold the viewer’s gaze and mind in a state of suspension, a testimony to her deep involvement with the complexities of the medium of painting.

Dana Lok (b. 1988, Berwyn, PA)received an MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. Solo exhibitions of her work include One Second Per Second at PAGE, New York (2020); Words Without Skin at Clima, Milan (2019); Mind’s Mouth at Bianca D’Allessandro, Copenhagen (2018); Soft Fact at Clima, Milan (2017); and The Set of All Sets at Chewday’s, London (2016). She is currently included in Regroup Show at Miguel Abreu Gallery and Fifteen Painters at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and will mount a new solo presentation at Frieze New York at the Shed in May, 2021. Lok’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery will take place in early 2022.

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