LOREN MYHRE BIO
LOREN MYHRE Break Time. 2024, Oil on canvas 22 ¼ x 30 ¼ inches.
BIO
Loren Myhre (American, born August 30, 1978) is a painter and sculptor living in Louisville, Kentucky. For the past 22 years, Myhre was preoccupied with abstraction. His art displayed loose thick brushwork and steel forms that were rooted in symbology. Myhre as of late has returned to image making that reintroduces figuration, landscape, and still life. Myhre retrieves ideas for his paintings from magazines, newspapers, and other photographic sources. He constructs the compositions for his paintings from these various collaged pictures and his own imagination. The subjects and scenarios that are most often depicted are moments of people and places on the outskirts of popular culture or customary civility. Recent themes in the paintings reflect solitude, individualism, and transience.
EDUCATION
2004 MFA Parsons School of Design, New York, NY
2001 BFA University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
TEACHING
2007-2016 Flagler College, Visiting Instructor of Fine Art; St.Augustine, FL
SELECT EXHIBITIONS
2025 Amalgamation, Group Show, WheelHouse Art, Louisville, KY
2024 Wild in the Streets, Group Show, KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY
Entering Wilderness, Group Show, Georgetown College Gallery, Georgetown, KY
Entering Wilderness, Group Show, Mellwood Art Center, Louisville, KY
To Be Honest, Solo Exhibition, Mellwood Art Center, Louisville, KY
2022 Ghost Volume, Group Show curated by Loren Myhre, Misc Goods Co, Louisville, KY
Rabbit Ears or Peace Sign, Solo Show, Mellwood Art Center, Louisville, KY
2021 Tim Faulkner Gallery, Group Show, Louisville, KY
2019 Native Picnic Blanket Social, Material Print Shop, Louisville, KY
2018 Billy Hertz Gallery, Group Show, Louisville, KY
2015 Rockless Volume, Group Show, Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT
Fred Giampietro Gallery, Group Exhibit, New Haven, CT
2014 Locking Yourself Out - Then Trying to Get Back In, Solo Exhibition, Nettles, St. Augustine, FL
2011 Crisp Ellert Gallery, Faculty Exhibition, St. Augustine, FL
2010 From Goya / To: Gooseneck, Group Exhibition, Nullspace Gallery, Jacksonville, FL
2008 Crisp Ellert Gallery, Faculty Exhibition, St. Augustine, FL
Todd Gallery at MTSU, Juror Dave Hickey/Group Exhibit-12X12, Murfreesboro, TN
2004 Aronson Gallery, Curator David Humphrey/Group-Things They Carried, New York, NY
2003 Graduate Faculty Building/New School University, Solo Exhibit-New Works, New York, NY
Hunter College Gallery, Group Exhibit-College Art Association M.F.A. Exhibition, New York, NY
AWARDS
2003 Chaim Gross Sculpture Scholarship, Parsons School of Design
PUBLICATIONS
2016 In the Studio Interview, Fred Giampietro Gallery New Haven Independent, Reckless Volume
2015 In the Loop Interview by Jessie Ward
2010 Folio Magazine (December Issue) review by Dan Brown
“It’s tough being an abstractionist. My mind is always conflicted and constantly seeking a solution through paint and objects. I attempt to discard of preconceived notions, empty my mind, and work exclusively from intuition. Much of my preoccupation lies in resolving conflicted surfaces that I have created for myself. Within my constructed surfaces there is room for refinement and crudeness. My objects that possess the ability of feeling particularized while slipping into free associative passages of poetry and profundity.”
– Loren Myhre
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Loren Myhre – In the Studio Interview
Fred Giampietro Gallery
Kimberly Myhre: What is your working process?
Loren Myhre: It’s funny; I don’t think I really have a working process. Art and life is not based around a governed routine at this stage in my life. I make art when I am afforded the time and work around a chopped up time schedule. Usually, I get to paint at home in one hour to two-hour bursts. Those few hours are really focused and intense moments for me. Working on sculptures in the studio is often relegated for late nights when everything is quiet and life seems to cease. I have found a kind of fairness in juggling everything.
KM: What are the differences between working on a painting and working on a sculpture for you?
LM: The element of time is the greatest difference between the act of painting and the act of sculpture. Painting for me is a lot more immediate and instantaneously gratifying. I can create something out of paint and instantly change my mind and destroy it and rebuild it again in a matter of minutes. Working in three dimensions and largely with industrial material you do not have that luxury. The sculptures evolve through more calculated steps. The creation and destruction of a piece of art has been on my mind lately. I believe destruction is part of the creative act. It may be more recognized in painting than in sculpture but it exists equally in my work.
KM: Who are some of the artists that have influenced you?
LM: The artists that have had the greatest impact on me have been those that I have had the privilege of sharing a relationship with. I worked closely with the sculptor Tom Butter in graduate school. He greatly molded my mind around how to think about sculpture. He showed me what sculpture could be and how it should function with time and space. Tom guided my thoughts about the use of materials to evoke a feeling, relay a mood or shape a state of being. I was also transitioning from being largely a painter to the sculpture end of doing things. Tom was influential in getting my ideas off the wall and to have sculpture inhabit a room and fill a space with its presence. I have always maintained my affinity for painting and another great mind I worked with in school was the painter Louise Fishman. If you ever need your faith restored in the power and necessity of painting, Louise is the one to talk to. Even though I was gravitating towards sculpture, Louise was keeping my one foot in painting. While a lot of people were making things that paraded as painting with stuff other than paint, Louise was pointing to what could still be done with a loaded brush and that was still exciting to me. Tom has become a dear friend and I still keep in touch with Louise as well.
KM: What works of art do you find yourself revisiting as sources for inspiration?
LM: I have been continually drawn to a photograph by Masahisa Fukase. It is titled “Dream Island, Tokyo” (from the series Solitude of Ravens). The photo is filled with mystery and is expressionistic in its scope. It is simultaneously beautiful and saturated with tragedy. Whenever I visit the Met I enjoy revisiting the painting “Woman with a Parrot” by Gustave Courbet. It’s light color and composition is mesmerizing. What is most fascinating to me about the work is what is faked and imagined. The bird in flight upon the woman’s finger, the heavy floral drape imparting a densely vegetative landscape – all of that stuff is made up out of his head. The pale luminous woman feels transplanted into this tent like paradise.
Gustave Courbet, Woman with a Parrot, 1866
Masahisa Fukase, Dream Island, Tokyo (from the series Solitude of Ravens), 1980, gelatin silver print, 29 x 43cm
More on the Artist:
Born in Estherville Iowa and raised in Florida, Myhre’s work reflects the rural landscape of his youth. He was a champion of the youth organization 4H raising sheep and cattle from a young age. This instilled in him an industrious work ethic and enthusiasm for all things found in nature. Though he juggles the role of husband, father and provider he manages to maintain a prolific art practice.
In Florida, during his undergraduate studies, his work was purely abstract pastoral landscapes. The transition to New York City for graduate school presented a new environment and he felt compelled to reinvent his working process. This wasn’t a gentle transition however, and what at first was sheer anxiety gave way to a rhythm of brave experimentation. His peers and instructors were an invaluable community to him during this time. Confined by the constraints of city life, in a walkup railroad apartment with a graduate student’s budget, he quickly grew fond of fabricating small sculptural pieces comprised of found materials. These early experiments laid the foundation for his process of balancing fabricated and found objects.
For the past 8 years Myhre has been living and making his art in Florida. He has served as an adjunct professor teaching courses in sculpture and metal sculpture at Flagler College. His work has continued to evolve hinting at an organic nature and a juxtaposition of found with fabricated materials.
-Kimberly Myhre, 2016
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Memory, Nostalgia, and Nature Serve as Shared Inspiration for Two Complementary Artists
Jun 7, 2016
PETER RAMON, Breakout, 2016. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
Though Peter Ramon and Loren Myhre work independently, their practices are inspired by many of the same themes, including memory, nostalgia, and the natural world.
Those shared inspirations make for an intriguing pairing. Their respective recent works are featured together in an exhibition at Fred.Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. If you didn’t know better, you might think all of the artworks were created by a single artist.
LOREN MYHRE. Efy, [LEFT], Efi [RIGHT] 2016. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
Myhre contributed paintings, drawings, and sculptures to the show, and it’s easy to spot the repetition of forms and colors across mediums—see, for instance, his mixed-media sculptures Efi and Efy (both 2016). But visual similarities also exist between the two artists, as in Myhre’s New Look Kicks (2016) and Ramon’s Untitled (2016). Both are colorful and abstract, laced with bold brushstrokes, curving lines, and circular shapes.
[LEFT] PETER RAMON, Untitled, 2016. [RIGHT] LOREN MYHRE, New Look Kicks, 2016. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
According to the artists, these work were inspired by nature, imagination, and the often blurry space between perception and memory. As Ramon has said of his work, “My paintings are abstract, informed by nature, comprised of memory, sideways glances, fleeting thoughts…and unrelated meanderings.”
[LEFT] PETER RAMON, Cat and Mouse, 2015. [RIGHT] LOREN MYHRE, Q and A, 2016. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
Myhre’s connection to the natural world is even more crucial to his artistic development. The child of a gardener and horticulturalist, he spent many days helping his father tend the plants and flowers in the family greenhouse—a “laboratory for the cultivation of beauty that could exist apart from understanding or explanation,” he has said. “Working in the greenhouses presented a wordless world of possibility and freedom.”
LOREN MYHRE. Rof, 2016. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
PETER RAMON, Play For Keeps, 2015. FRED.GIAMPIETRO Gallery
Youth amid such greenery helped pave the way for Myhre’s fruitful career as a sculptor and painter. It’s unsurprising, then, to learn that many of his mixed-media sculptures were created with found materials and industrial scrap. After all, he has called art making a “restorative process,” one undoubtedly brimming with the aforementioned possibility and freedom. In fact, Ramon relies on a similar type of creativity. “Like most artists,” he has said, “I draw upon life experience, nature and the world around me. The tools I use, the approaches I take, have mostly to do with how I interpret those things at that particular time.”
—Bridget Gleeson
