ART CITIES:London-Lisa Lou

With an emphasis on repetition, formal perfection and materiality, Liza Lou’s artworks thrive on the tension between the apparent impossibility of their construction, the seductive beauty of their surfaces and the often sinister implications of their subject matter. Over the past several years, while living and working in South Africa, Liza Lou has developed a body of work based upon further ideas of confinement and protection.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

From the very beginning of her career in the early 1990s to today, Liza Lou has established a rigorous exploration of materiality and beauty in a labor-intensive practice that melds elements of both fine art and craft.  In “Desire Lines” Liza Lou showcases 10 works that poetically illustrate Lou’s engagement with the natural environment, abstraction, and her own oeuvre spanning 30 years. The title of the exhibition is a term commonly used in landscape architecture planning to name the egress that occurs naturally as people (or animals) move instinctually through an environment, creating unplanned paths. Lou has engaged this concept since 2010, beginning with her “Solid | Divide” series made in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where the artist maintained a studio from 2005–2020. “Carbon Gunmetal | Divide” (2012) is a bichromatic composition that evokes the horizon line of the Indian Ocean. This bead-woven canvas is marked by varied horizontal streaks, the result of natural oils transferred from the hand of the artist and her assistants through constant holding, touching, measuring, and sewing. Over time, the threads that comprise the warp and weft of the work alter the perceived color of the glass beads and create spontaneous veins and variations—conceptual and material “desire lines.”  Since 2019, the artist has divided her time between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California. These diverse landscapes can be identified throughout her newest series of paintings in both palette and sculptural form. Whereas many of her earlier works were tightly woven and uniformly controlled, recent shifts find the artist cutting apart her pure color fields and reinventing them in new formal gestures. In “Into the Mystic” (2021), white beaded sheets hang in a grid formation, providing a monochrome ground for strips of effervescent blue, silver, and white that are draped in rhythmic waves. These undulating patterns mimic the tide lines left in the sand at the water’s edge, drawing a conceptual connection to landscape and becoming pictorially charged with changes in natural light over the course of the day. “Here Comes the Sun” (2021) similarly features grids of white beaded ground upon which painted beaded strips hang in inverted arches that stretch across the work’s surface. The clay-like color of each band is stained in colors recalling the richness of the desert topography in Joshua Tree. Three square sections are left blank, uninterrupted by the strips of painted beads, offering a visual pause that allows the viewer to consider the relationship between form, color, and line. Lou’s woven paintings present an exploration into all the parts of her work that have come before, and in both works, the artist teases out specific elements―cutting, stripping, smashing, draping―engaging them as unique gestures that move freely across the canvas in poetic synchronicity. “Lost Highway” (2021) exemplifies Lou’s ability to consistently push the formal and conceptual nature of her practice. This densely layered and highly pigmented work is an explosion of color, line, and texture. Rows of white beads are marked with thick, tonal gray, cut apart and then layered on top of one another, charting paths across the composition that resemble tread marks. Bright pops of pink, green, yellow, blue, and orange are interspersed throughout, punctuating the spaces between the dense black splashes of oil paint. In this work, subtle nods to past inventions and explorations can be identified. Painted cloths are cut into strips, hammered areas expose the underlying thread work, and painterly gestures resemble a magnified view of the meditative and repetitive marks of Lou’s Drawing Instrument series and the seductive, lush pigmentation found in her large-scale painting, “Desire Lines” (2019) as well as her monumental installation “The Clouds” (2018), among others. Providing a much-needed respite from recent events, this exhibition offers the concept of desire lines as a poetic and metaphoric possibility, creating a conceptual space for contemplation and meditation.

Photo: Liza Lou, Not Dark Yet, 2021, Glass beads and thread mounted on canvas, 56 x 69.88 x 3.937 inches / 142.24 x 177.50 x 10 cm, © Liza Lou, Photo: Joshua White, Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, England, Duration: 15/9-6/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com