In Dana Lok’s intricate figurative paintings, visual transformations coupled with unexpected and often counter-intuitive vantage points tease at the seams of how signs and representations express meaning. Each distinct body of work engages a range of specific ideas or problems as they undergo a translation from language to visualization, with the paintings recording all the distortions, spontaneous slippages, and sleight-of-hand substitutions at play to bridge the gulf between thought and image. Lok’s paintings stage a heightened and at times surreal drama of compositional space in which different modes of knowledge and meaning-making are both props and actor, theater set and subject. Threading delicate tensions between signifiers, images in Lok’s work gesture to their absent opposites, hidden in the shadows or just out of frame. Like a magician’s trick, optical cues abound, distracting the viewer while subtly pointing to the fact that there is always more going on than meets the eye.
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Dana Lok (b. 1988, Berwyn, PA) received an MFA from Columbia University in 2015 and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2016. In 2018, Lok was awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant. Solo exhibitions of her work include As Syllable from Sound, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2024); Closer to the Metal, Clima, Milan (2023); Part and Parse, Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2022); One Second Per Second, PAGE, New York (2020); Words Without Skin, Clima, Milan (2019); Mind’s Mouth, Bianca D’Allessandro, Copenhagen (2018); Soft Fact, Clima, Milan (2017); and The Set of All Sets, Chewday’s, London (2016). Selected group shows include Eye of the Blackbird,Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA (2025); Double Lift, David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis (2024); Strange Sensation, Foyer LA, Los Angeles (2024); darling, your head’s not right, curated by Danica Lundy, François Ghebaly, New York (2023); Anything can pass before the eyes of a person, Derosia, New York (2023); X PINK 101, X Museum, Beijing (2023); The future perfect will have arrived, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2023); Le Biscuit à Soupe, High Art, Arles, France (2022); Gravity, a proposal, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2022); Regroup Show, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2021); Fifteen Painters, Andrew Kreps Gallery (2021); PAGE (NYC), Petzel Gallery (2021); and In Place Of, curated by Leah Pires, Miguel Abreu Gallery (2016), all in New York. Her work is held in the collections of Espacio 2021, La Palma; Pinault Collection; and X Museum, Beijing.