Lynne Harlow is an American contemporary artist whose work explores the relationship between color, light, material, and architectural space. For more than twenty-five years, she has developed a reductive visual language that moves between painting, sculpture, and installation. Harlow’s practice begins with the question of how much visual and physical information can be removed while still creating a generous and affecting experience for the viewer.
Harlow works with materials including cast and kiln-formed glass, Plexiglas, ceramic, silk organza, vinyl curtain, aluminum chain, wood, and artificial turf. She selects materials for their color, transparency, texture, movement, and ability to respond to changing light. Her works often extend beyond the boundaries of a traditional painting or sculpture, incorporating the wall, floor, surrounding architecture, and movement of the viewer into the composition.
Through geometric forms, saturated color, and carefully considered placement, Harlow creates installations that appear visually simple but shift through sustained observation. Transparent surfaces alter the color of the wall behind them, reflective materials respond to their surroundings, and suspended textiles move with light and air. Her practice draws attention to subtle perceptual changes and to the ways an artwork can reshape the atmosphere of a room.
Harlow was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1968. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Framingham State College and a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. She became a member of American Abstract Artists in 2006, joining the historic organization dedicated to the development and presentation of abstract and non-objective art in the United States.
Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally in Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Museum exhibitions include the 2013 deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MoMA PS1, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, the Hofstra University Museum of Art, the RISD Museum, and the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca.
Harlow has presented solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including MINUS SPACE in Brooklyn, the Saint-Gaudens Memorial in Cornish, New Hampshire, Drive-By Projects in Watertown, Massachusetts, and Liliana Bloch Gallery in Dallas. Her solo exhibitions with Liliana Bloch Gallery include Hey Sunshine in 2016, Golden in 2019, and Time Is a Healer in 2023. The latter combined geometric abstraction with varied material surfaces in works addressing perception, restoration, and the passage of time.
She has received an Artist Grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, a Fellowship in New Genres from the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, the Robert and Margaret MacColl Johnson Fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation, and a residency fellowship from the BAU Institute. In 2002, she was a visiting artist at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Her work has been discussed in publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, and Artnet Magazine.
Harlow’s work is represented in significant public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art Library Special Collections, The Phillips Collection, the RISD Museum, the New York Public Library, and Hunter College. Her work Golondrinas is held by both The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection as part of the American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio.
Lynne Harlow lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. She is represented in Dallas by Liliana Bloch Gallery, where her work is available to Dallas art collectors interested in contemporary abstraction, minimalist sculpture, installation, and artists represented in major museum collections