Laurie Hogin

Laurie Hogin (born 1963) is an American artist, known for allegorical paintings of mutant animals and plants that rework the tropes and exacting styles of Neoclassical art in order to critique, parody or call attention to contemporary and historical mythologies, systems of power, and human experience and variety. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, International Print Center New York, and Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati. Her work belongs to the art collections of the New York Public Library, MacArthur Foundation, Addison Gallery of American Art, and Illinois State Museum, among others. Ann Wiens characterized her "roiling compositions of barely controlled flora and fauna" as "shrewdly employing art historical concepts of beauty for their subversive potential." Hogin is Professor and Chair of the Studio Art Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Laurie Hogin, Pinup Bunnies (Bunny Suite #1): Tomato, oil on panel, 19" x 23", 1994.

Life and career Laurie Hogin was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1963. She studied art and cultural anthropology at Cornell University (BFA, 1985), before enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986 (MFA, 1989). After her first solo show at Peter Miler (1990), others soon followed at the Mint Museum (1992), Kohler Arts Center (1993), and Littlejohn Contemporary (New York); she has also shown regularly at Koplin Del Rio (Los Angeles/Seattle, 1999– ), Schroeder Romero (New York, 2003–11), Tory Folliard (Milwaukee, 2004– ), and Opus Art (Newcastle, 2007–15). Career surveys have been held at the Evanston Art Center (1997) and Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (2007). Art in America, Juxtapoz, New Art Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune, among other publications. Her artwork has also been published in Harper's Magazine (several issues), The Stranger, The Bear Deluxe, and Lapham's Quarterly, among others. Hogin is based in rural east-central Illinois, where she lives with her husband, photographer and filmmaker Greg Boozell, and son.

Work and reception Laurie Hogin, Riches from the Four Great Rivers, oil on canvas, 57" x 81", 1995. Hogin's work employs techniques, vocabularies, and visual codes from the history of painting and visual culture: 17th-century Dutch "embarrassment of riches" still lifes, naturalistic, 18th-century English landscapes, Baroque portraiture, French Romantic historical tableaux, natural displays, and more. She uses them to create mordant, diorama-like scenes that critique, parody and sometimes propose alternatives to contemporary cultural and social issues or celebrate aspects of human experience. She upends these genres with lushly painted, thoroughly researched canvases whose elaborate visual conceits feature surreal, mutated animal protagonists (e.g., snarling rabbits with tiger skins, screeching monkeys, or albino alligators) chosen for their allegorical associations and overgrown, toxic landscapes. Writer Maureen Sherlock aligns Hogin's wry approach with satire, caricature, and the Surrealist and Enlightenment projects of unmasking ideologies and codes of representation. Hogin surrounded these narrative canvases with ironic, handcrafted frames of wood veneer and gold leaf, cursive inscriptions quoting romantic, period paeans to the land, and lists of chemical pollutants. In Riches from the Four Great Rivers of the Earth (1995) she replaced Rubens's nymphs with mutant beasts; Laurie Hogin, Diorama with Psychodynamic Species, oil on canvas, 36" x 48", 2010.

In the 2000s, Hogin frequently focused on the interplay between human drives, evolutionary biology and consumerism, The series "Allegory of Psychodemographics: 24 Branded Products My Family Uses on a Typical Summer Day" (2006) examined consumer goods from Ambien to toothpaste, as did the later "Sugar Trilogy"; two solo shows in New York ("Neuromantic Evening, Psychotropical Paradise" and "Monkey Brains," both 2008) commented on the effects of psychopharmacology in contemporary life with depictions of gun-toting, dazed monkeys, fluorescent reptiles, and an installation of 100 portraits of mutant guinea pigs with rabid features and radioactive coats, called What Ails Us: The 100 Most-Prescribed Pharmaceuticals in the Nation. In 2017, James Yood wrote of the over-saturated, apocalyptic parables in her show, "Implacable Demons and Better Angels" (e.g., Portrait of a Startled Rabbit Near a Culvert, 2016), "Hogin sees everywhere a comely corruption, an animal kingdom so giddy in its savagery and evil that only the trappings of an overcharged and hothouse beauty could describe it."

Although Hogin is most known for painting, she has created sculptural and fabric works, as well as drawings and prints.

Writing Hogin's published writings include fiction, critical reviews and essays, and chapters in the publications Painters on Painting, The Figure (2014), Living and Sustaining a Creative Life (2013), and The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook (2016), among others.