The work of textile artist Liza Lou will launch the inaugural exhibition of Lehmann Maupin’s new Chelsea Gallery this September. Lou will present a series of recent bodies of work produced over the last three years, including her monumental The Clouds (2015-18).
Lou’s artwork is a thoughtful meditation on community and labour, as well as process and repetition. She investigates the sociopolitical constructs of gender and class by challenging conventional definitions of art and craft, and of 'women’s work'. For more than 20 years, she has made sculptures and installations using glass beads as her primary medium.
For her new exhibition, Lou breaks with the highly controlled surfaces of past work, using beads of different sizes to make sculptures that resemble coral in their accretive masses. Anchoring the exhibition will be a site-specific installation of The Clouds, a 100-foot-long woven painting modelled after Monet’s triptych Les Nuages (1922).
The Clouds is composed of a grid of 600 beaded white panels on which the artist has made individual plein air oil paintings of Southern California clouds. When each panel was complete, the artist smashed areas of the woven beads with a hammer, partially destroying the image but revealing the ghost-like traces of the underlying thread.
Liza Lou, 6 September - 27 October 2018
Lehmann Maupin, 501 West 24th Street, New York