Sam Michell: Sour Orange

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present Sour Orange, Sam Michell’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, and her debut with the gallery. Based in Mérida, Mexico, Michell presents a series of horizontally oriented paintings on paper alongside a single, larger-scale canvas. This work is a deeply personal yet formally disciplined investigation into corporeal memory and emotional proximity. Rooted in the traditions of figurative painting yet persistently in dialogue with abstraction, Michell’s compositions emerge from an intimate engagement with the body—as form, as recollection, as a metaphor—creating space for reflection on gesture, presence, and the subtle tensions between inner experience and visual expression.

The exhibition unfolds through a nuanced chromatic arc, beginning with the sharp acidity of orange and gradually descending into the dense quietude of viridian green, with ochre recurring as a grounding emotional register. The horizontal orientation of the works on paper lend a cinematic rhythm, evoking suspended moments and fragmentary recollections. These paintings possess a raw immediacy that is both gestural and deliberate, hovering between meditation and unfinished narrative. Michell distills vulnerability and movement through fragmentation: a foot curled inward, an elbow extending outward, a pelvis hinted at more by its absence than its contour. The central canvas amplifies this language, presenting a reclining figure stretched across a couch-like form—part domestic furniture, part psychoanalytic symbol. The posture is uneasy yet intimate, a site of both exposure and quiet introspection.

Michell’s work is shaped not by linear narrative but by atmosphere—a sensorial and psychological space constructed through restrained mark-making and a finely attuned relationship to color, line, and space. Her engagement with the history of painting is felt as resonance rather than reference; tradition is not meant to be quoted nor imitated but carried forward as tension, weight, and embodied continuity. These works resist closure, embracing ambiguity and the elusive, tactile nature of memory. They suggest that remembrance is not solely an act of the mind, but one of the body—a process of retrieving what has been physically held, emotionally absorbed, and silently endured.