Current Exhibition: Bubblegum Garden, Natan Lawson

Press Release:

Foyer is excited to present Bubble Gum Garden, an exhibition of new works by Natan Lawson, opening January 9th from 5:30-8:30pm at 16 W Broad street and up through March 27th.

Bubble Gum Garden presents a landscape where play is carefully engineered. Using a CNC plotter to apply paint to canvas, Natan Lawson translates the logic of needlepoint and textile patterns into physical form. Repeating motifs (flowers, grapes, spirals, and bubble gum) are rebuilt as “analog pixels”—individual marks of paint mapped to a grid, collapsing distinctions between domestic craft and modern technology.

The paintings shift between clear imagery and dense pattern; some reading as cheerful icons and others dissolving into abstraction. Bright color and repetition make the work feel playful and immediate even as the underlying structures remain rigid and controlled.

 At the center of the exhibition is a functioning gum ball machine. Like the paintings, it works through repetition and visibility; dispensing color, one piece at a time, through a fixed mechanism. Rather than acting as a symbol, it simply extends the systems already present in the work into the gallery space.

Artist Bio:

Natan Lawson received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been featured in exhibitions at 11 Newel Gallery, New York, NY (2022, 2021); Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, Towson, MD (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2020); and Resort Gallery, Baltimore, MD (2018), among others. Lawson’s paintings have been featured in multiple HBO and Netflix productions and are represented in collections such as Kadish, Paris and San Francisco, CA; Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, Boston, MA; and Capital One, McLean, VA. In addition to other honors, he received an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council (2016). He lives in Baltimore, MD.