2025 NEDDY FINALIST IN PAINTING
“2025 Neddy Finalist in Painting
Lauren Boilini
Lauren Boilini was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana. She received her BFA in Painting and Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a painter she also works in installation and public art. She has served as an artist-in-residence at Can Serrat in Spain, Jentel Arts in Wyoming, Soaring Gardens in Pennsylvania, the Studios of Key West, the Creative Alliance and School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, and as a Consortium Resident at the SACI in Florence, Italy. She was invited as an artist-in-residence to the Burren College of Art in Ireland and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2012. She has completed projects for the Maryland Department of Public Health and the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. In 2016 she was awarded a GAP grant to publish a book of drawings and worked on the sequel during a residency at MASS MoCA, which she completed for a solo exhibition at Furman University in 2020. In the winter of 2022 she opened a solo exhibition at Pacific Lutheran University and spent ten weeks as artist-in-residence at Amazon’s headquarters in 2023. The following fall she was the first artist-in-residence at the Missoula Butterfly Museum and a fellowship from the McMillen Foundation helped to fund a residency on Vashon Island last summer.
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In my current body of work I look at the idea of excess, when images of excess become meaningless and fall into the realm of pattern. This idea of gluttony is reflected in our current culture. We are a hedonistic society, always looking for more until the more we are looking for loses its meaning.
My studio practice has consistently been painting, often extending into the realm of installation. Research, reading and exploration are vital to my process, consistently driving my work forward. I am fascinated with crowds of beings converging in one space at one time. This includes stampedes, orgies, feeding frenzies, migrations, etc. The pattern and beauty that emerges from these chaotic scenes pulls me into the studio to recreate that same energy.
Recently I have been drawn to images of battles and duels; I am interested in what drives us to violence and destruction of life. My dismay paired with the attraction I feel for the conflict that I see around me leads me towards research into how violence in the animal kingdom mirrors our own, and particularly where it overlaps with human behavior. Violence is most often a problem of gender and I work to understand why. This drives me to look at what is nature and what is nurture, always searching for answers, and puzzling through the beauty I find at that intersection…”