Desert Nudes

Lorena Lohr's Desert Nudes reproduces twenty-four oil paintings from her ongoing series of the same name, a project on which the artist has now been working for more than a decade.

Primarily recognised as a photographer until now, Lohr is probably best-known for her photographs of the American Southwest, a region she has explored and documented extensively through travels by train and Greyhound bus. These journeys have influenced her work as a painter, which in the context of this series combines imagery based on the landscapes and built environment of the country’s desert states with meticulously-rendered depictions of the female form.

The paintings in the series, reproduced here in full colour, can be understood as commemorations of the desert that at once pay homage to the abundance of life present in a region known as a barren wasteland. Lohr, a self-taught painter, is also impassioned by art history – and while the compositions that constitute ‘Desert Nudes’ combine multiple references to classic Americana in their representation of the Southwest’s distinctive terrain (and in certain cases, of interiors and clothing) they also attest to her interest in the tradition of Northern Renaissance devotional painting, notably where the nudes themselves are concerned.