Biography

Lauren in her Studio, Charlottesville, VA

Lauren Moses received a BA in History from The University of Virginia and a BFA in Painting & Printmaking with a minor in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University. Moses' work has been displayed at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Nicolet College in Rhinelander, WI, Healdsburg Center for the Arts in Healdsburg, CA, Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA, McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, VA, The FAB Gallery in Richmond, VA, Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, CO, and Mountain Lake Biological Research Station, University of Virginia in Pembroke, VA. Moses' work is included in public institutions including The University of Virginia Hospital as well as personal and corporate collections across the country and abroad. Moses currently resides in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband and three children.

Through layered acts of drawing, painting, erasing, and reforming, my work explores the endurance of inherited visual languages — classical figuration, religious iconography, and cinematic tropes — and their reverberations in contemporary culture. I’m drawn to the contradictions embedded in these images: goddesses and nymphs idealized yet circumscribed, beauty and fertility celebrated yet controlled, desire suspended between reverence and violence, good and evil.

In dialogue with feminist scholarship and reimaginings — from Stephanie McCarter’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Marina Warner’s Monuments & Maidens and Angela Carter’s subversive retellings — I reframe archetypes that continue to shape how women are seen today, as well as how we see ourselves. These paintings inhabit a space where the body is porous, unstable, and transformed — where inherited myths collide with contemporary spectacle, and meaning slips between past and present.

Painting, for me, is both excavation and invention: images fracture and reform, surfaces accumulate and erode, and gestures bear traces of failure, persistence, and transformation. Within this shifting terrain, I explore how desire, power, and identity are shaped — and reshaped — by the lingering myths and visual inheritances that continue to define us. - LM, 2025

Statement

Paintings