"The Birthday Party" Painting

Abigail is a native of Charlotte, North Carolina and received her BA from Coker College in Hartsville South Carolina, where she developed her uniquely muscular and fearless painting style. Her background in stage design often leads her to large scale pieces that envelop the viewer in her unique vision. Abigail McLaurin's figures hold the razors edge of tension in a shadowy world between the certainty of the strong black line and emergent, luminosity that makes them appear lit from within. Her canvases are gripping and visceral, pulling us into the darkness, to world of half-resolved, forms, the paint worked with deliberate violence. When she turns to portraiture, her uncommonly skilled and uncompromising eye strips away the mask of civility to produce works of rare emotional power. McLaurin's images can be challenging, even jarring, bearing the insistence that we see that which is difficult, disturbing, even horrific with clear vision and find with a start, that it is simultaneously beautiful. - -Wes Chester Curator Martha Pace Swift Gallery, San Diego, CA