How to be massive

On the 6th August 2025 Pace Gallery announced it is representing painter Lauren Quin. It’s the third best gallery in the world so let’s look at how she got there.

I ran my values-analysis process on her and the favourite is ‘respect for process’. She talks about paintings as problems to be solved, it can sometimes take a good while for her to complete each work. There are other values at play of course, but we’re looking from a marketing point of view and simplification often helps. For our purposes here, I’m going with her process is her art.

She’s been selling through auctions. Her record was her debut auction, Airsickness in March 2022 which sold for £441,000 (roughly $587,000 US) but it’s not a steady ship, in 2022 she sold $1.74m, in 2023 $995k and in 2024 maybe $400k. She sold Ulta Bearing in Hong Kong for $178,000 and that buyer resold it but only realised $22,000.

It would be clear to any gallery there’s money to be made here and selling at this level at auction is a guaranteed way to raise gallery interest.

So how did she get here?

She’s independent, like her dad, a self-taught hobby painter. She has an art degree from Chicago in 2015 (but skipped the intro classes) and a masters from Yale in 2019 where she was inspired by Fernand Léger who at one stage, while the cubists painted everything square, painted everything as a tube. Tubism, applied to her work, becomes a marketing hook, something to remember her by, something for journalists to ask about. It’s a doorway into exploring her work rather than a literal description of what you’ll see.

Exploring Yale for a moment they accept perhaps 5% of applicants. They want a distinct voice, skill, recommendations from people they respect, and a willingness to push yourself. Those are available to all, and the cost of both art schools she attended can be provided for those with less means. The harder part is having the time and resources to get good.

Notably, she makes large work, for example 6 feet by 12 and has described painting as athletic. She starts by painting something she doesn’t like and everything after that is about ‘solving the problem’. She layers paint, then scrapes at it to reveal what’s underneath. In this way all the layers are somewhat visible. She uses trace monotype printing to make half-there lines.

Her first solo exhibition was Bat’s Belly in Stockholm’s Loyal Gallery in June 2021 to which she attaches the story that it’s inspired by her watching a bat dipping its wings in the family pool when she was a kid. She appears to use visceral biology and detailed sensuality to deniably evoke an eroticism, Cronenberg style. In an interview about a later exhibition My Hellmouth she talks of diving deep into her mouth. I see it as genius and subtle playing of the establishment and an unspoken hook for the audience. Digging my hole even deeper, some might say that as an attractive young woman, that isn’t replicable by everyone (but perhaps we all have privileges, we all play to our strengths). (I realise I’ve transgressed societal norms but this is marketing, we wrestle with the psyche all day.)

Notice she names well, her work and her exhibitions.

Wait, go back. Stockholm? She’s in the US isn't she? Location is fluid for her, she’s global, studying in the eastern US, living in Los Angeles, she goes where the energy is. Warhol did the same, moving to New York strategically to become famous. LA has a number of mid-tier galleries and plenty of collectors.

So how did Stockholm happen?

(interview continues below .. )

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