Lauren Seiden

Lauren Seiden (b. 1981, New York, NY) lives in New York. Seiden achieves an epic grandeur through unexpected means, using the tools of drawing — primarily pencil and paper — to create objects with sculptural gravity. More recently, she has broadened her vocabulary to include marble, as well as a series of readymades—a way to more explicitly, as she puts it, "engage the weight and history of contemporary issues."

Seiden’s sculptural practice deals with the manipulation and elevation of quotidian materials into sculptural form. Utilizing fabric and paper, sculpted and stiffened, then layered in graphite pencil, her works act as a crystallization of the tension between soft and hard sculpture. She applies graphite in unconventional ways to unexpected surfaces as a means of bringing 'drawing' itself into the foreground and redefining its terms. Seiden has developed unique but labor intensive processes - she gilds all her surfaces by hand, methodically drawing on paper, stone and cloth - a task so labor-intensive it seems an obsessive, almost devotional act. In her latest body of work this consuming process is not purely an aesthetic decision; Seiden is making a statement on the concept of labor, about what kind of labor is valued and seen and what is invisible.

Exhibitions include Touch Knows You Before Language at Lyles and King Gallery, New York, Drawn Together Again at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Pussy, King of the Pirates at Maccarone, Los Angeles; The World on Paper at the Museum PalaisPopulaire, Berlin; Open Sessions: ACTION + OBJECT + EXCHANGE at the Drawing Center, New York; Spatial Flux: Contemporary Drawings from the JoAnn Gonzalez Hickey Collection at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO; and self-titled solo exhibition at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. In  2019, Seiden was included in a two-artist exhibition, The Line in Between, at Galerie Nosco, Marseille. She will also be included in the 2021 biennial at the Heart Museum in Denmark. Seiden has been reviewed and featured in ArtForum, Modern Painters, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Fag City, New York Magazine, Time Out NY, The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, and Blouin Artinfo. Her work resides in numerous private and public collections.