Lauren Quin

Lauren Quin was born in 1992 in Los Angeles and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, attended a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2017, and completed an MFA at the Yale School of Art in 2019. Her paintings work at the edge of figure and field, built from tightly coiled, tube-like forms rendered in acrylic and oil that read as biological and mechanical at once.

Quin's early solo exhibitions took place at Los Angeles and San Francisco spaces including Real Pain Fine Arts, Smart Objects, Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, and Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco, before Blum and Poe in Los Angeles gave her a series of solo shows, including Pulse Train Howl in 2022. That same year she had a solo exhibition, Sagittal Fours, at Pond Society in Shanghai. Her first US museum solo exhibition, My Hellmouth, opened at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, in January 2023 and ran through that June. A New York solo debut, Logopanic, followed in 2024 at 125 Newbury.

Quin joined Pace Gallery in August 2025, with Pace announcing plans for her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Eyelets of Alkaline, to open at Pace Los Angeles in January 2026. She continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Quin's rise has been marked less by prize culture than by rapid institutional embrace: inclusion in major museum collections, a fast succession of solo gallery exhibitions on three continents, and her 2023 museum solo debut at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, which the museum itself described as her premiere solo museum exhibition. Critics have consistently focused on her recurring "tube" motif and the layered, etched, almost hallucinatory color fields that resist a single reading as either landscape or body. No single verbatim critical assessment could be confirmed for this profile with exact wording attributable to a named critic in a major outlet, so none is quoted here.

Quin's reported auction high is approximately USD 587,000, achieved in 2022 for what Artnet described as one of her "kaleidoscopic abstractions." The specific work's title, the auction house, and the exact sale date are not documented in any source reviewed for this profile, so they are omitted here rather than guessed. That price has not been matched since. Subsequent reporting on her auction results describes a marked decline, with her highest price the following year falling to roughly USD 242,678, and later results dropping further still, a pattern consistent with the volatility common to young artists whose auction history is still short and thin. Market trackers have also reported cumulative auction sales in the low single-digit millions to date, though that figure comes from a single aggregator and should be read with caution.

Quin's market is defined by a strong primary-market narrative, museum collecting, and representation by a major gallery, set against a secondary market that remains small and volatile. Her single auction high from 2022 has not been repeated, and later results have trended well below it, so any purchase decision should weigh the specific work and moment of sale rather than a single headline price. There is no catalogue raisonne for an artist this early in her career, and authentication runs through her current gallery, Pace, together with records from her prior gallery, Blum and Poe. The 2025 transition from Blum and Poe to Pace is worth watching as a signal of continued institutional and market support.