Location: Sebastopol, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: laehglenn.com
Laeh Glenn (Wikipedia) was born in 1979 and received her BFA in Painting from California College of the Arts in 2008 and her MFA in Painting from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2012. She lives and works in Sebastopol, California, in Sonoma County. Glenn is represented by Altman Siegel gallery in San Francisco.
Glenn’s work has been recognized with significant awards including the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2017) and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, which she received in both 2011 and 2012. Her paintings are held in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Glenn works in oil on canvas and linen, producing paintings that investigate the digital life of images — how repetition and circulation across screens degrades, flattens, and transforms visual information. She begins with source material found online, including 3D models used in gaming, advertising, and architecture, and translates them through a painter’s process that flattens forms and extracts elements in broad strokes. The resulting surfaces are matte and controlled, with refined edges and handmade wooden frames, often with raw canvas borders. Each painting registers subtle shifts in tone, texture, or scale that mirror the compression artifacts and visual drift that occur as images travel between devices and platforms.
Artforum describes Glenn’s work as “nostalgic yet eerily placeless.” Her paintings engage with art-historical genres — still life, portrait, nude, geometric abstraction — while filtering them through a contemporary digital sensibility. In her more recent work, Glenn has drawn on themes of digital permanence and loss, including how a person’s online presence continues unchanged after death. Her paintings give digital images “a place of their own, a home off the screen.”
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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