Lorian Gwynn: Self-Pulled Strings

Jarvis & Werner is pleased to present Self-Pulled Strings, Lorian Gwynn’s debut solo exhibition in New York. Bringing together paintings made over the past year, the exhibition moves between portraiture, scenes of collective experience, and depictions of a recurring cast of marionette-like figures. Gwynn considers how memory and circumstance shape a person: how we are acted upon, and how we respond in turn.

The subjects in Gwynn’s paintings are often people she knows well, carried into the work through recollection as much as observation. In Jimi and My Muse, gesture, color, and what is evoked by the figures’ faces are of greater importance to the paintings than semblance or fidelity to each person’s likeness.

Our Own Theatre expands this private register into the relationships within a group. The painting’s reference comes from a wedding among artist friends that was both an actual ceremony and a performance art work, and Gwynn treats it as a memory of being together rather than a fixed account of the occasion.

Other collective scenes come from more unsettled memories. Orange City, perhaps the most narratively explicit work in the exhibition, recalls an illegal rave Gwynn attended years ago that ended in police violence, along with other episodes of unrest she has witnessed. The scene remains legible, but its compressed space and heightened color preserve the tension of the event rather than reducing it to realism.

In Rumpelstiltskin in Disguise (Repelsteeltje in Vermomming), even the action is difficult to name. The two figures are less clearly resolved, and their encounter might be a fight or a dance. Everyone Was Looking at a Different Moon disperses the narrative further, as bodies overlap and color breaks up the scene until the nature of the gathering becomes difficult to grasp. Gwynn depicts bodies crowding, overlapping and merging against the pictorial space around them.

The marionettes sharpen the exhibition’s question of agency. Gwynn’s puppets are moved by forces beyond themselves, but they are also responsible for their movements. Habit, memory, and social expectation leave their marks without eliminating choice. In this way Self-Pulled Strings presents a compact Hegelian image: the subject is both determined and self-determining. This motif reaches back to childhood toys through which Gwynn invented characters and imagined other worlds. Painting continues that activity in another way: experience can be revisited, altered and given a new shape.

Movement runs through the exhibition not only as a subject but as a condition of the paintings themselves. Figures lean, turn, dance and fight, seemingly caught between one action and the next. This gives the scenes a sense of flux, defying the static nature of the medium. The same push and pull governs how the paintings are made. Gwynn builds her surfaces slowly, beginning with acrylic before working through successive layers of oil. She does not follow a fixed plan; each state of the painting sets up the next decision. The image can push back. Paint thins into washes or gathers into denser passages, contours disappear into neighboring color, and figures sometimes emerge late in the process. The result is a surface that never resolves evenly, which gives the bodies much of their peculiar mobility.

Throughout Self-Pulled Strings, painting offers Gwynn a way to keep lived and remembered experience in view long enough to examine it. People and events remain present but elusive.

Lorian Gwynn (b. 2001, Utrecht, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from the HKU in Utrecht in 2023, followed by a residency at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem; Dordrechts Museum, Dordrecht; Jarvis Art, New York; tegenboschvanvreden, Amsterdam all 2026. Paintings by Gwynn are held in a number of prestigious Dutch public collections including Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Museum No Hero, Delden, The Dutch Government Collection and Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. In 2026, she was awarded the Royal Award for Modern Painting by Willem-Alexander King of the Netherlands and in 2024 she won the Buning Brongers Prize.