Liza Lou: Painting
Lehmann Maupin, New York
September 5 – October 12, 2024
Lehmann Maupin presents Liza Lou: Painting, an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist. Spanning the gallery’s New York location, the exhibition features a series of abstract works on canvas in which Liza Lou explores the most singular feature of a painting—the brushstroke. Activating the intense chroma and refractive qualities of glass beads, Liza Lou uses her signature material to flow and coagulate into a new form of paint, applying beads in free-form gestures through an intuitive approach. As they collide and overlap on the canvas, Lou’s beads reconstruct strokes of paint, an often-fetishized aspect of mid-century American Abstraction. Concurrent to this exhibition, Liza Lou’s landmark Trailer (1998–2000), will be installed (opens September 13, 2024) in the Brooklyn Museum lobby gallery; it is a recent addition to the permanent collection and will debut at the museum in September, offering an opportunity to experience the artist’s most recent work alongside this rarely-seen immersive sculpture.
In a career spanning three decades, Liza Lou has become widely known for introducing beads as a contemporary fine art medium. Her persistent experimentation has challenged hierarchies and injected humor and glamour into a Feminist vision. Lou’s project is an open-ended investigation into the metaphoric possibilities of a humble material to draw attention to the poetic and painful dimensions of labor, the artistic process, and the complexities of American life.
In this new series of paintings, Liza Lou renders what appear as quick, painterly gestures in grain-by-grain minutiae. Beads naturally resist blending or mixing; thus, Lou renews Frank Stella’s admonition to “paint as good as in the tube,” applying pure color directly to canvas. The placement and color of each paint stroke is predicated in the moment, purely in reaction to the stroke preceding it. In an aesthetic call and response, colors are superimposed or juxtaposed, reveling in joyful adjacencies. Bright chroma radiates across the canvas in vivid jabs while lattice work builds up and propels itself outward. At close range, the tiny, individual 3-dimensional pieces of factory-made color jostle each other, resulting in micro explosions that register as surprise, offering a new take on American Abstract painting.
Known for her community-based approach, Liza Lou’s current work emerges from a period of solitude spent living and working alone in the Mojave desert in Southern California. From this undiluted experience in nature, Lou reveals a close look at the act of painting itself, magnifying granular gestures and, as she has described, “listening to the material.” Together, Lou’s exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin and the Brooklyn Museum provide portals into the evolution of Lou’s decades-long practice—one centered in materiality, invention, and possibility.
LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK
501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
