Mimi Lauter: Cultivating the Landscape

Mimi Lauter’s emotionally charged and vividly coloured universe is predominantly composed of oil and soft pastels on paper. Her works consist of expansive fields of saturated colour, which she heavily layers and etches into, creating swirling textures that form abstracted narratives. Lauter builds her imagery from diverse sources, including mythology, literature, the social and political atmosphere, and her personal memories and dreams, all to express the relationship between image and existence. Her paintings reveal a range of 19th and early 20th-century influences, from Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard, and Jean-Édouard Vuillard to Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington, and the rich colours of Mexican folkloric imagery.

Lauter refers to her garden as an “ongoing, constantly changing epic mural,” which serves as inspiration for her compositions and colours. It is meticulously planned and attuned to each coming season, ensuring a constant rotation of colour and vegetation. Her home overlooks the garden, which thickly surrounds the studio, enveloping her in a rich, constructed natural world at all times.

Lauter’s use of pastels evokes the act of sculpting clay, with the malleability of the medium lending a sense of physicality and intuition as she carves through dense layers of pastel to create passages of expressive impasto. Her dense surfaces are achieved through a process of layering, where she covers the entire paper with oil pastel, creating a saturated, tactile ground upon which she can draw and incise. The process of building up and then digging down into the surface mirrors her act of gardening, a constant and transcendental source of inspiration in her work.

Somewhere between landscape and still life, Lauter’s episodic works explore the inherent tension between these two historically charged styles of painting. For Lauter, the theatrical structure of a still life painting is often a metaphor for mortality, while a landscape represents the potential of life – something she realised while meandering through her own garden in search of new growth, reflecting on the path or composition that guides a viewer through landscape painting. Similar to her approach of suspending the viewer between these two opposing structures of painting, she employs this strategy in her representation of the external and the internal, the epic and the personal, the expansive and the most intimate detail.