Lehmann Maupin returns to ADAA: The Art Show, with a solo presentation of important works by Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou. The gallery’s focused presentation marks the first showing of In Medias Res (2017), which will be displayed alongside other never-before-seen works from the artist’s archive. This curated selection highlights Lou’s decades-long engagement with repetition, meditative process, and materiality using glass beads as both subject and primary material. Coinciding with ADAA: The Art Show, Lou’s landmark installation Kitchen (1991–1996)–which belongs to the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art–is currently on view at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. In 2024, the Brooklyn Museum will install Lou’s iconic Trailer (1997-99), where it will remain permanently on view. Lou will also open a solo exhibition of new work at Lehmann Maupin New York.
Throughout her decades-long career, Liza Lou has challenged and expanded the boundaries between the fine and applied arts by introducing glass beads as a conceptual medium. Early in her career, she forged an original, Feminist-inflected vision using beads as an index of time and process in figurative, room-sized sculpture and installation works that rendered labor radically visible on both formal and conceptual registers. For the past fifteen years, Lou has turned her focus to abstraction and repetitive processes to engage with art history while exploring the conceptual and metaphoric potential of absence and materiality.
In her presentation at ADAA: The Art Show, In Medias Res comprises a series of 17 intimately-scaled assemblage works that capture a moment in the artist’s studio on July 6, 2017. Lou explains, “We were in progress on a large sculpture, when I was struck by the poignancy of the work in process on our tables. I realized that this moment was the work. Everything was halted and we glued the work on the tables in place, just as it was.” Dimensional clusters of gold beads float like constellations upon naturally-stained fabric in dark blue, chocolate brown, and matte gray, just as they lay on studio work tables. Thread unspools from clusters of beads and trails over each surface; each title reflects the time of day that the work was frozen.
In contrast to the improvisational gestures of process captured in In Medias Res are two highly-wrought works, Graphite | Solid and Soil | Solid, both 2012. In these wall-based works, identical colored glass beads are sewn together to create a unified woven surface, which is then stretched across stretcher frames. Their beaded nature elicits a resistance to the cold machine-made repetition typically associated with Minimalism. As a result of Lou and her studio team’s meticulous handiwork, fingerprints and oils from the hand are naturally absorbed into matte beads, impregnating the work with the accretion of human touch; subtle streaks and tonal variations appear across the surface in horizontal stripes, revealing the intimacy and physicality of the process of beadwork as both subject and art object.
Also on view from the artist’s archive, The Present (2008) is a rope woven together using a helix stitch with antique glass beads, needle, and thread, tied into a loop and then stretched across the wall in the shape of a rectangle with a bow hanging down the middle. The work operates as a gestural line drawing of the form of a gift, as well as a framing of the present moment.
Across these and other works featured in the presentation, Lou explores the conceptual possibilities of her chosen medium, meditating on time, process, and the inevitable indexical nature of painting with beads, by hand.