“Group portraits and painting have a long tradition: I translate that into the present to capture moments that have a personal tinge” says Lorian Gwynn about her recent paintings in which she brings together colleagues, family, and friends in a collage-like manner. Gwynn has the ability to draw the viewer into the construction of her suggestive and poetic fiction. She herself says that the present is central to her work. By that, she means the shared moments with her loved ones and acquaintances, the chaos and restlessness of daily life, but also larger, more general and timely themes such as the idea of transformation and connectedness. For example, The Orchestra of Whispering Gestures is a collage of memories from the past year — the final year of her residency at De Ateliers. She draws from her memories of the many encounters, the long evenings, and the unexpected discoveries. At the same time, she is aware that those memories are constantly being reinterpreted. In her portraits, she links this fluidity of memory to the fixed form of portraiture.
What’s remarkable in Gwynn’s work is that this form never takes on the ‘frozen’ solidity of a photograph, but instead remains dynamic, as she never literally fills in her portraits. There seems to be no hierarchy within the image either. Her figures emerge and then disappear again to make room for another figure. The viewer’s gaze, so to speak, never has to get stuck anywhere. Crucial to this is the intelligent way in which Gwynn uses the pictorial space, omitting or adding elements so that each figure, as it were, gets its own stage within the image. And together, they form The Orchestra.
Lorian Gwynn was born in 2001 in Utrecht. In 2023, she earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from the HKU in Utrecht, followed by a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2024, she won the Buning Brongers Prize, in 2023 she was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting, and in 2026 she was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting. Her work has been included in exhibitions in Amsterdam (2025, Offspring, De Ateliers), The Hague (2025, Residency of the German Embassy), Delden (2025, Museum No Hero), Amsterdam (2024, Arti et Amicitiae), Amsterdam (2023 & 2026 Royal Palace), New York (2025, Jarvis Art), London (2026, upcoming). Paintings by Gwynn are part of the collections of Museum Voorlinden, Museum No Hero, Frans Hals Museum, and various private collections.