Lorena Lohr: Motel Nudes
19th March, 2025 – 19th April, 2025
Soho Revue
14 Greek St, Soho
W1D 4DP
In Motel Nudes, the latest installment of the Desert Nudes series, artist Lorena Lohr extends an invitation to peer into a world at once intimate and distant. This collection, composed entirely of miniature works, recalls the tradition of the “love token” and devotional images found throughout art history—from the High Renaissance to the Victorian era. Seventeen portholes, both antique and custom-made, act as tiny windows, offering a moment of quiet observation, an Alice-in-Wonderland-like glimpse into scenes imbued with stillness and reverie.
Where the mythos of the American West has long been dominated by a cinematic flurry of rugged movement and male bravado, Lohr instead offers an alternative: a series of women captured in a state of complete ease. Reclining nude across motel beds, plastic chairs, and sun-scorched carpets, they are poised yet unhurried. Their gestures are subtle, their gazes self-assured—women at rest, wholly unperturbed by the world beyond their frame.
Lohr’s compositions evoke an unlikely synthesis: the brooding solitude of an Edward Hopper painting, the wistful economy of a Raymond Carver story, and the delicate intimacy of a Victorian trinket box. Smoke curls from lit cigarettes, legs hover mid-air in casual perfection, hair spills over shoulders in soft, unstudied waves. There is a cinematic quality to these figures, yet they remain resistant to narrative; they are neither waiting nor longing, merely existing in their own moment, undisturbed.
Rooted in Lohr’s personal experiences of traveling alone through these desert landscapes, Motel Nudes explores the duality of female presence: at once luxuriating in solitude and subtly aware of the ever-present male gaze. These figures, however, offer no invitation. Unlike the compositions of past masters where clues—an empty chair, a second glass—suggest an unseen companion, here, no such traces remain. There is only the woman, and the space she has claimed entirely as her own.
Image courtesy of Soho Revue
Yet the pull of these small-scale works is undeniable. The very act of looking—through portholes, through frames—compels the viewer to lean in closer, to examine these jewel-toned vignettes with a voyeur’s curiosity. And still, no space is made for entry. These women, like sirens in a painted mirage, beckon the eye but keep their world resolutely theirs. The viewer may observe, may admire, but will never quite belong.
As we pass from one miniature to the next, the journey through Motel Nudes becomes its own kind of pilgrimage—an exploration of solitude, power, and the quiet allure of a world that exists just out of reach.
Lorena Lohr: Motel Nudes opens on the 19th of March, 2025 until the 19th of April, 2025 at Soho Revue
©2025 Soho Revue
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