ART-PRESENTATION: Liza Lou-Classification and Nomenclature of Clouds
Liza Lou’s boundary-breaking work first gained international attention when her sculpture, “Kitchen” (1991-96), was shown at the New Museum in New York in 1996. Her sculptures, room-size installations, and performances have broken boundaries between art and craft, sculpture and painting. In 2005 Lou founded a studio in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa to work with women deeply versed in the tradition of beadwork to assist her in the making her larger scale work, with the aim to create real social change.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
Liz Loy inaugurates Lehmann Maupin’s new space in New York with her solo exhibition “Classification and Nomenclature of Clouds”, a continuation of the exhibition will be featured at the gallery’s West 22nd Street location, with a room dedicated to an installation of paintings and sculpture from Lou’s “Terra” series. The title of the exhibition is inspired by amateur meteorologist Luke Howard’s “Essay on the Modification of Clouds” (1803), which met with great acclaim when it was presented as a lecture in 1802. By classifying and naming the clouds, he influenced painters and poets alike. Observing daily atmospheric phenomena in the two cities where the artist divides her time, Durban, South Africa, where clouds are often tumultuous, and Los Angeles, where skies are mostly blue, Lou began to make cloud paintings en plein air. This exhibition features the resulting monumentally scaled work, “The Clouds” (2015-18), the work is comprised of a grid of 600 beaded cloths, which are hand sewn in her Durban studio. These cloths become the surface upon which the artist paints and then partially smashes the beads away with a hammer, revealing the paint-stained network of thread beneath. The materiality of the cloths is in stark contrast with the groundlessness of passing clouds. In “Nacreous” (2018), Lou paints over the surface of the beads, and then layers additional woven cloths with the beads crushed away atop the painted forms, creating a sfumato effect with hazy skeins. In “Nimbostratus” (2018), Lou utilizes a grid pattern and glass cloths to different effect. Here, she applies thick oil paint to 16 glass bead-woven panels, then hangs them reversed to reveal the cloud-like stains and discoloration, which is the result of chemical oxidation of the paint on the silver-lined glass. The exhibition also includes a series of sculpture and wall reliefs where Lou challenges the limitations of her chosen material. There are two large-scale examples of Lou’s drawing practice, which have taken more than 11 years to complete. Lou considers the smooth, gessoed canvases upon which she draws to be instruments; as each mark is made, it is accompanied by an audible sound from the artist. The lower-level gallery of the other Lehmann Maupin’s space at is dedicated to “Drawing Instrument” (2018), a video in which layered recordings of many days of drawing and singing are compiled into a complex and haunting audio/visual remix, in which she captures each small circular mark she makes while singing the word “oh”. Falling just short of the mantra “om” “oh” repeats the o-like shape she is drawing, and it is also an exclamation between certainty and uncertainty, which lies at the heart of all art processes.
*Sfumato is a painting technique for softening the transition between colors, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane. Leonardo da Vinci was the most prominent practitioner of sfumato, based on his research in optics and human vision, and his experimentation with the camera obscura.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York and 536 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 6/9-27/10/1/, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
