Desert Nudes - Lorena Lohr

This hardback book reproduces twenty-four oil-on-panel paintings from Lohr’s ongoing ‘Desert Nudes’ series, a project on which the artist has now been working for more than a decade.

Primarily recognised as a photographer until now, Lohr is probably best-known for her photographs of the American Southwest, a region she has explored and documented extensively through travels by train and Greyhound bus. Similarly, these journeys have influenced her work as a painter, which in the context of this series combines imagery based on the landscapes and built environment of the USA’s desert states with meticulously-rendered depictions of the female form.

The paintings in the series, reproduced here in full colour, can be understood as commemorations of the desert that at once pay homage to the abundance of life present in a region known as a barren wasteland. Lohr, a self-taught painter, is also impassioned by art history – and while the compositions that constitute ‘Desert Nudes’ combine multiple references to classic Americana in their representation of the Southwest’s distinctive terrain (and in certain cases, of interiors and clothing) they also attest to her interest in the tradition of Northern Renaissance devotional painting, notably where the nudes themselves are concerned. As the gallerist and curator Cassie Beadle of Cob Gallery writes in her introductory text to the book:

‘Lohr observes that while Columbus arrived in the Americas in the late 15th century, around the time the Northern Renaissance was at its peak, the American desert largely remained unexplored by Europeans until centuries later. As such, Lohr brings the credence and aesthetics of the Northern Renaissance to the ‘New Frontier’ – a vast, wild and poetic landscape still unexploited in the time of the Northern Renaissance artists. In Lohr’s works, nude figures could be understood as desert mirages, mythological goddesses or holy apparitions.’

In addition to the images themselves and Beadle’s introduction, Desert Nudes includes Burning Love and Hot Oil, a previously unpublished story by Lohr herself that takes its cue from online fan fiction erotica but also chimes with the imagery depicted in her paintings.