Lorena Lohr's 'Behind The Curtains' at Soho Revue: tiny, sensual paintings

Lorena Lohr picture of nude woman in small round frame — Lorena Lohr, Girl and Motel Curtain

(Image credit: Lorena Lohr)

To get a good look at the paintings in Lorena Lohr’s Motel Nudes series, you must lean in closely. They are miniature round works, some as small as six centimetres wide, each an imagined portrait of a woman in a motel room, 'caught mid-action, kind of luxuriating in suspended time' as described by the artist. Lohr dreams up every detail in an instinctive, open way, but draws from her many travels around the American Southwest, giving the paintings a layered, 'palimpsestic quality.' Motel Nudes is an ongoing series, and four recent paintings are newly on show in London at Soho Revue, as part of the group exhibition Behind the Curtains.

Lohr is a self-taught photographer and painter, and her journey from camera to canvas has been a patient one. 'In 2010 I was riding a Greyhound bus in Arizona at sunrise and saw the desert for the first time,' she says. 'Everything changed at that moment and, for some reason, one effect was that I had the idea of making some kind of devotional painting of a nude in that specific pastel-hued desert setting. The problem was I couldn’t actually draw or paint. So I taught myself, working whenever and wherever I could – it took a ridiculous amount of time.' Her first series of paintings was Desert Nudes, executing that vision of a woman posed in the mythical landscape, and in Motel Nudes the works are far smaller and set inside, with glimpses of familiar distant horizons out of windows.

picture of woman in small round frame — Lorena Lohr, Blonde in Blue Room, 2025

The Motel Nudes paintings recall Victorian love tokens – which for Lohr are 'a great blend of chintzy and erotic' – in their size, as well as tiny details in Medieval and Northern Renaissance paintings, and intricate portraits on tombstones. They are uniquely compelling, evoking the faded glamour and cinematic nostalgia of the American motel setting. Their size and shape mean that looking at them is akin to gazing through a peephole, giving them what Lohr calls 'a charge of desire.'

'I guess the theme of isolation runs through my work,' she says. 'Motels are a living symbol of isolation – and a strange juxtaposition of being places of utility, and symbols of transience, escapism or the promise of a new life. There are endless stories being played out between the walls of their rooms.'

Lohr describes her paintings as 'parallel viewpoint' to her photography, which tends to avoid featuring people, instead capturing 'arrangements they leave behind.' While photography allows her to document her surroundings, 'drawing and painting for me is a way of reaching small fragments of the past and making them into more of a relic', she explains.

Moments in art history have also informed her practice. 'I was obsessed with paintings of the Northern Renaissance, artists like Joachim Patinir where the landscape itself became centre stage. But I saw there weren’t paintings with that sensibility based in the American desert, or an image of a female nude that wasn’t tied to allegorical or religious narratives – more specifically a figure just lying down in a large vista, being at ease with the surroundings.'

In her works, she is able to reimagine and question what that feeling of ease might look like: 'If you are a woman travelling alone you’re looked at with suspicion or confusion, but the Western idea of the male lone traveller is heroic and mythological. In the Southwest of course you have the cowboy or outlaw archetypes – so the girls I paint have ended up playing with tropes of that imagery.' Here we stumble upon calm, confident women at rest, and are left to imagine where they might be headed. 'There is always a window or door out into the landscape – I suppose signifying that they aren’t trapped, and are still part of the natural world.'

'Behind the Curtains' at Soho Revue until 28 February

TOPICS

Belle Hutton is an arts, culture and fashion writer based in London. Previously the assistant digital editor of AnOther Magazine, she has contributed to titles including i-D, as well as interviewing an array of cultural luminaries, including Nadia Lee Cohen, Jamie Hawkesworth, Vanessa Beecroft, Chitose Abe and Grace Wales Bonner, among others.