Exhibition on view: September 6 - November 4, 2025
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Desert Nudes, a solo exhibition of the latest works by painter and photographer Lorena Lohr. This represents the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Opening September 6th from 5:00 - 7:30pm.
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.
Who are they, the nudes in Lorena Lohr’s Desert Nudes? Alone, usually, they are ciphers. But 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—unreachable—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 jutting out of it or standing before a desert spring.
“When you make art, you want to create a new world”
“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 feminism, 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.
Lorena Lohr is a British-Canadian artist who has spent more than a decade traveling the American Southwest by bus and train, documenting its transient landscapes and the vernacular character of its built environment. Lohr’s work takes in a variety of artistic disciplines. As a photographer, she captures everything from motels and bars to parking lots and patches of waste ground, focusing on unexpected and often uncanny aspects of the commonplace and mundane in the places she visits without ironic detachment or comment. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at Soho Revue, Cob Gallery, Claire de Rouen Books, and Galleri Urbane. Lohr’s photographs and paintings have been featured in multiple publications and she has collaborated with Versace, Gucci, A.P.C., W Magazine, AnOther Magazine, Pop Magazine, WSJ, Bella Freud, and Susie Cave, among others.