Location: 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207
Lorena Lohr: Desert Nudes
September 6th - November 8th, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday September 6th from 5:00 - 7:00pm
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Desert Nudes, a solo exhibition of new works by Lorena Lohr. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Join us for the opening reception Friday, September 6, from 5:00 to 7:00 PM.
An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition.
Who are they, the figures in Lorena Lohr’s Desert Nudes? Alone usually, they are ciphers. But they are one with the desert, its arid landscape reflected in the pale, sand-dune-colored tones of their flesh. The way they brush its rocks with their fingertips suggests familiarity as they preen, their wavy hair billowing, their lips set in a tantalizing, beatific smile.
Lohr’s nude subject is a mysterious primal force, like an archetypal goddess: Gaia of the Desert, Our Lady of Arid Lands. But also a femme fatale: Temptress of the Saloon, Venus of the Motel. The ambivalence of the setting accentuates the unknown. Where are we? In inhospitable terrain, in remote places (or are they?) her women summon water, holding a glass with a straw or standing before a desert spring.
Surrounded by cacti, they loll in landscapes potentially awash in Freudian symbols. Lohr’s nudes are unphased. If we see in them the techniques of Northern Renaissance artists such as Lucas Cranach or Hans Memling, it’s because of the graceful way Lohr takes in both subject and object with an all-encompassing grace. “They would look at every single thing,” Lohr says of her Old Master guides, portraying everything “with the same level of sacredness” such that “everything has its moment” in luminous harmony.
We see in these paintings, too, talismans of contemporary freedoms and emancipation. The swirls of cigarette smoke exactly match their flowing hair. We feel that Lohr’s gaze has rested on the subject—and it is not an exploitative gaze. It is an empowering female observation, the tongue-in-cheek, nostalgia-tinged genre hybridity entirely her own. Perhaps as one does when one spends time in the desert, Lohr has a way of composing with emptiness, engaging the space of nothingness around the subject.
New compositional fodder, Lohr’s tiny circular paintings, similar to Victorian miniature portraits, augment the sense of mystery. Condensing a world into a very small space, they offer only the amount of narrative that fits within the scope of the portal. The viewer imbues the rest with her imagination. We enter. “When you make art, you want to create a new world,” Lohr says. She does, and invites us in. If there is an escapism in Desert Nudes is it that of not being a stranger, of not having, as the artist has said, anyone worry about where you’re coming from or what you’re about to do. What would it be like, she seems to ask, to be completely at ease? To feel like a piece of the landscape.
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