Studio Visit: Erica Mahinay

Erica Mahinay works between painting and sculpture, creating gestural works that relate to the body even as they rely on a vocabulary of abstraction. The artist paints on traditional support materials like canvas and linen but also on other fabrics, such as silk parachute fabric. Mahinay applies paint with both a paintbrush and her hands, creating opaque and see-through areas, and she also uses dyeing techniques that saturate fabric with color. She draws our attention to the way a painting is made, emphasizing the substrate and infrastructure of the object and giving materiality to color and gesture.

Mahinay (b. 1986, Santa Fe) received a BA from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2013. Mahinay has had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York (2019, 2017); T293, Rome (2019, 2014); Ibid Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2015); and Loudhailer, Los Angeles (2014). Recent group exhibitions include those at Lyles & King, New York (2019, 2018); Jir Sandel, Los Angeles (2017); Rainbow in Spanish, Los Angeles (2016); Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2016); Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles (2016); and Embassy, Los Angeles (2016). She was an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (2009–10).