Lehmann Maupin is pleased to return to Frieze LA (Stand A03) with works by Liza Lou, Lee Bul, and Liu Wei. Together, the three artists embody the gallery’s diverse program of international artists innovating in their respective media.
Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou will present recent works representative of a new era in her practice. Known for the past 30 years for working primarily with glass beads—including large-scale installations like her monumental Kitchen (1991-96), now on view as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s long-term collection show Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019—Lou has exposed the potential of the medium as not only a material, but as a conceptual object. Her latest series can be classified as both painting and sculpture, and Lou continues her unorthodox mode of production by painting upon, layering, smashing, and mending the beads in dense, multi-layered configurations.
Lee Bul will present new works from her Perdu series that blend biomorphic and cybertronic forms, vividly yet delicately rendered in acrylic paint and mother of pearl. Beginning her practice during the 1980s with performance and sculpture, the South Korean artist has continuously pushed the boundaries of representational art, creating new modes with her architectural and technologically wondrous installations and mixed-media paintings that expose the human desire to transcend ideas of traditional evolutionary progress.
Chinese artist Liu Wei will present works recently exhibited in his first US solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and the Cleveland Museum of Art, including Library V-V (2017-2018), from the artist’s series of the same name in which he carves compressed print materials and books into forms that resemble eroded cityscapes. Characteristic of the artist's interest in the relationship between narrative and materiality, in this series Liu Wei conflates the intellectual activities of reading and looking with the rhetoric of humanities through the representation of cityscapes.