OCHI is pleased to present Polychromic, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Caitlin Lonegan. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Polychromic will be on view at OCHI Sun Valley, located at 119 Lewis Street in Ketchum, Idaho. An artist’s reception will be held on Saturday, July 8^th from 5:00 to 7:00 PM.

This body of work, consisting of five paintings, continues Caitlin Lonegan’s use of the full spectrum of hues, a range of application techniques, and her interest in spatial illusion that can come from patterned mark-making.

To begin each painting, Lonegan maps out fields of shape and color. With each successive mark of oil paint, she transcribes what she sees—the shifting light in her studio, a glint of color on the surface of a glass, an odd city line—onto the canvas. Responding to the visuals around her, as well as to the gessoed surface of the canvas, Lonegan builds slow textures that refract both the world and her direct experience of it. Polychromic includes works that maintain Lonegan’s compositional tendency to leave a central gesso-white abyss and works that abandon this device in favor of entirely paint-covered surfaces. Lonegan’s approach to creating illusionistic space draws upon muscle memory accrued from recreating Impressionist and Renaissance artworks—a time honored exercise for young artists learning how to paint. Her paintings source their palette from artists such as Fra Angelico and Claude Monet, moments of pattern from the textile imprints of Francis Bacon, and space from Cezanne and Constable.

As Lonegan works, she moves the canvas from the wall to the ground, repeating form and revising so that the painting becomes a generative map, determining its own making. This movement accesses different versions of the ever-changing light qualities in her studio. Iridescent hues containing ground mica mixed with transparent pigments capture and reflect light sources as a viewer shifts around the work. The inclusion of the metallic paint lends the painting an optical delicacy, drawing attention away from the painting’s illusion and towards the fact of its material presence. Likewise, the facture of her paintings alternate lithely between washes and impasto; brush strokes feel equally native to the history of painting and Lonegan’s specific act of seeing.

Lonegan’s paintings, made slowly, also reward slow looking. If one is patient, they will encounter numerous portals, where colorful worlds seem to emerge and dissipate. Each of these five works suggest a perspective at the edge of subjective experience, optical perception, and empirical fact—a consciousness both skittering and contemplative, caught up in brushstrokes and paint sheen. The viewer navigates these paintings through discreet passages that direct both inward towards the illusion of space and feeling, and outward towards the world.

Caitlin Lonegan (b.1982) received her BA from Yale University in Art and Applied Physics in 2005 and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at venues such as Various Small Fires in Dallas, Texas (2023); Vito Schnabel Gallery in St Moritz, Switzerland (2022); Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York, NY (2021); Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Vienna, Austria (2022, 2021, 2018); Susanne Vielmetter in Los Angeles, CA (2018); and ACME in Los Angeles, CA (2012; 2010). Lonegan’s work has been featured in public group exhibitions including Abstract Painting Now! Gerhard Richter, Katharina Grosse, and Sean Scully… at Kunsthalle Krems in Krems, Austria (2017); Wake Up Early Fear Death: Caitlin Lonegan, Rebecca Morris, Laura Owens, a series of three solo exhibitions curated by Philipp Kaiser at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder in Austria, Vienna (2014); and the major survey exhibition Made in L.A. 2014 at UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA (2014). Lonegan’s works can be found in many museums and permanent collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA; Pérez Art Collection in Miami, FL; The Beth Rudin DeWoody collection in Miami, FL; Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany; Berezdivin Collection in Puerto Rico, USA; Strauss Collection in Rancho Santa Fe, CA; Benton Museum at Pomona College in Pomona, CA; and the SoArt Collection in Vienna, Austria.