Raging Beauty

Frosch & Co is pleased to present Raging Beauty, Magnolia Laurie’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring recent paintings by the Baltimore-based artist. In this new body of work, Magnolia Laurie seeks out the sublime in forms of growth that are persistent, invasive, excessive, and lush. Drawn to spaces where nature presses against systems of order and containment—gardens spilling beyond their borders, vines engulfing fences, vacant lots overtaken by dense undergrowth, and rewilded preserves reclaiming managed terrain—the artist explores sites of unruly abundance that hold both tension and tenderness. Within these environments, the work searches for humor, hope, beauty, and signs of endurance. The paintings in Raging Beauty are saturated and sensorially charged. Horizons dissolve, destabilizing perspective and making orientation uncertain. Rather than observing a landscape from a distance, viewers move through shifting fields of texture, color, and gesture, as though walking within an overgrown environment that continually expands and recedes. Space compresses, inverts, and unravels, allowing the work to oscillate between recognition and disorientation, intimacy and overwhelm. Through this unstable terrain, Laurie considers persistence—of nature, of color, of beauty—as a form of resistance. To make and create is positioned as an act of optimism, rooted in hope for the future. In a time shaped by instability, anxiety, anger, and fear, these paintings insist upon a beauty that is loud, unruly, unapologetically raging, and alive. Beginning with vivid neon underpaintings, the artist slowly builds each surface through layers of color, mark, and accumulated gesture. As the compositions evolve, traces of these synthetic colors continue to surface and push through the painted skin, refusing to disappear beneath the weight of successive layers. Their persistent luminosity creates moments of optical vibration and atmospheric intensity that tug at the senses and destabilize perception. These flashes of artificial color behave much like the invasive growth depicted within the work itself; tenacious, unruly, and impossible to fully contain. Rooted in painting and informed by the traditions of landscape painting, Magnolia Laurie’s practice constructs visual poems and allegories about our entangled relationships to the land. Drawing from fields including climate science, geology, biology, gardening, and landscape preservation, she gathers fragments of observation, research, and lived experience, recontextualizing them through the language of landscape. The paintings become spaces where ecological, emotional, and imagined terrains overlap. Born in Hyannis, MA, and raised in Puerto Rico, Magnolia Laurie lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College, a P.B.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of Art, Maryland Institute College of Art. Laurie is an Associate Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues, including The Phillips Museum of Art, PA, Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC, Kemper Art Museum, MO, MONO Practice, MD, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Laurie’s work has been supported by grants from the Creative Baltimore Fund, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Belle Foundation, and the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. The artist has been awarded residencies across the United States including at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA, the Vermont Studio Center, VT, and the Jentel Foundation, WY.