Episode IV: Lauren Brown, Host at Hoxton Arches, East London – It looked rather powerful on line, it looked like it might be worth the effort of a walk to Hoxton, it looked even more powerful as you walk into the railway arch through the big front door: the drama of it all, the theatre, big paintings, the unity of colour, a whole line of them, the collective energy of them all. Paintings that demand you stop in the doorway and just take it in for a moment, just pause and not rush it, let you adjust. This is a beautiful hang, the line of paintings on one wall, the one at the end flanked perfectly by the smaller pieces that in all honesty you’re not going to pay much attention to, it is all about the big canvases. It is all about the big pieces, it is all about that line of paintings and the dozens of questions you immediately want to ask about Lauren Brown and her process, her train(s) of thought, the order in which they were painted, it looks like… well?

“In this latest body of paintings, Brown explores the uncertain relationships between invitation and expulsion, containment and dissolution, interiority and exteriority. Animated by opposing forces, forms gather and transform across densely worked surfaces, only to resist the boundaries and structures that appear to contain them. Marks accumulate, overlap and interrupt one another, creating arabesques of opposing orders and choreographed chaos. The suggestion of a recognisable body emerges from the paintings’ density and pressure, before dissolving into the surrounding space…”

Did she, Lauren Brown, work on them all at once, did she work very quickly on one and then move just as quickly to the next one? Surely these were painting pretty much in one go? All at the same time? Over one (relatively short) period of focused time? And those marks made, the colour engaged with? The (almost not quite brutal) energy so obviously involved in there with the softness, with the warmth. The bits almost destroyed? And that intensity? That intensity involved in just letting those ambiguous layers come at you as you stand there in the middle of the room looking into the middle of the paintings and of course you don’t want the answers to any of the questions you need to ask. Of course you want that ambiguity, you want all this to all be running through your head as you look at them, into them, as you search through the paint, the layers, the marks, the emotion, the emotions, the (surely instant?) decisions made before contemplated and then re-decided?

Colour very obviously plays a central role here, it is more than just atmosphere, there’s depth in the colour, in the unity of them all; there’s warmth, these are the colours of bruises aren’t they? No, that’s too obvious and there is no obvious read. It is all uncertain, the colour, the gestures, even the direction the paint runs in now and again (is that one hung the right way up? Did she sometimes have the canvas the other way?)   

“At the heart of Host is the uncertain relationship between interior and exterior. To be ‘in’ suggests attachment, accumulation and the pressures of containment; to be ‘out’ implies the dissolution of boundaries, passage and otherness. Brown brings these conditions into constant negotiation, as bodies become landscapes and physical presence gives way to psychological space. The host becomes both a site of possibility and a source of tension, capable of sustaining something while simultaneously threatening to prise it apart….”

And I guess we are all going to read these things slightly differently, if indeed we can actually read this body of work with any kind of certainty? And really who is to say who is right and who is wrong when it comes to what a painting might want to say, does the painter have any more right to say than the viewer? We are surely going to read these invitations, or this single invitation to this one body of work, this invitation to these traces of whatever happened here in different ways? The key thing is we are compelled to want to try, we can’t help but make the effort when so many paintings don’t demand that effort.

It is good to see this body of work like this, to see all these paintings together as one whole, to see them together as one body of work in the space and the light that this venue affords these pieces. Do try to go if you can, it might be the only time they are all together like this. This is a highly recommended exhibition (sw)

The exhibition is presented by Matt Carey-Williams – Lauren on Instagram

Episode IV: Lauren Brown, Host runs at Hoxton Arches until Sunday 8th November 2026. The space is open Monday to Sunday 11am until 6pm (midday until 5pm on Sunday). Hoxton Arches is sound right outside Hoxton overground railwat station (come out turn to the left cross the road, big green door). Arch 402 Cremer St, London, E2 8HD.

As always do click on an an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show…