Artist Spotlight: Lauren Seiden

EXPLORING LAUREN SEIDEN’S LUSH GRAPHITE ‘SCULPTURES’

By Kate Messenger

Living and working in New York City, Lauren Sieden has had exhibitions in New York City, Miami, Brazil, Germany, Istanbul, Italy and the UK. Beyond gallery and institutional settings, Seiden’s work has also been placed for staging in high end real estate sales in New York. Curated by the design team ASH, Seiden’s work was installed at Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick’s townhouse at 20 East 10th Street in Greenwich Village when it was being sold last year, as well as the development at 10 Sullivan Street in Soho by celebrated architect Cary Tamarkin. ASH specifically selected Seiden’s work to enhance the interior experience of these spaces, bringing a unique architectural physicality to otherwise flat walls. These homes were widely publicized and featured in New York Magazine and Architectural Digest, and Sieden’s work has been reviewed and featured in ArtForum, Modern Painters, Time Out NY, and Blouin Artinfo.

In the Western tradition, drawing is most commonly a two dimensional medium – the scaffold on which the more rarified practices of painting, sculpture, and architecture are built upon. Lauren Seiden’s practice expands the act of drawing beyond the page, exploring the essential elements of process and materiality through an intuitive and intimate layering of graphite. Testing the conventions of drawing, Sieden breaks down the surface and transforms these materials into a physical, textural and structural form. For example the “Wrap Series,” made of large sheets of stiffened rectangular paper that have been laboriously rubbed with graphite, project off the wall in a sculptural expansion. Graphite pervades every surface as she applies this same process to hanging thread, steel, marble, and floating on the surface of water; showing how as these materials transition, they begin to masquerade as a new form of the material’s natural state.

Seiden’s graphite based sculptures bring drawing itself into the foreground, redefining its terms by drawing in four dimensions and creating a new form beyond the expected medium.

Seiden’s artworks were used to stage Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick’s townhouse at 20 East 10th Street when the property was being sold last year. Seiden’s Shield Wrap 3 is shown in this photo (photo credit: Christian Harder and ASH)

Seiden’s Raw Wrap 10 shown installed at 10 Sullivan Street in SoHo when the new development property was staged for sale (photo credit: Christian Harder and ASH)