TURN Gallery is pleased to present Karyn Lyons’s Under the Spell. This marks Lyons’s solo debut at the gallery.

In this new body of work, Karyn Lyons draws upon her experience as a young woman as she revisits the interiority of her teenage years, unfolding longing and loneliness, as well as the private pleasures. Most of the paintings depict a young subject in intimate moments, rendered through loose brushwork and saturated color, recalling a jotted down memory. Lyons explores the yearning and fantasies of adolescence, often complicated by family secrets tucked into the corners of the seemingly perfect interiors.

“Adolescence is a transformative moment…a time to search for one's identity as well as a time of sexual awakening. I remember the rush of emotion listening to music on the floor of my bedroom. It was less of an intellectual engagement but more of a spiritual feeling. The poetry and the music connected me to a world and a community larger than myself and I realized that my imagination was a way to transcend the isolation of my present.” - Karyn Lyons

Incorporating art history as well as cultural and sartorial references, Lyons examines how our visual vocabulary remains rooted in these formative years, developing out of the movies, television, music and books we consumed. Remembering the specifics of then–a favorite Rolling Stones album, a box of cereal studied over and over at the breakfast table, a tube of Bain de Soleil–Lyons colors the navigations of past moments and makes vivid times that have been both bitter and sweet.

Karyn Lyons’s most recent group exhibitions include Mother and Child, Friends Indeed Gallery in San Francisco, CA; Sweet Jane in Fields of Daisies, Philips Hong Kong; Summer Sun, The Journal in East Hampton, NY; Towards a More Beautiful Oblivion, Fredericks & Freiser in New York, NY; Frozen Time, Galleria Annarumma in Italy; Nostalgia, TURN Gallery in New York, NY.

PRESS

AnOther Mag, November 18, 2021

M Le Magazine du Monde, November 6, 2021

Larry's List, November 3, 2021