LIAT YOSSIFOR: Communicating Vessels

LIAT YOSSIFOR creates monochromatic paintings that are equally pictorial and physical. Using an alla prima technique, Yossifor works within the durational limitations of the liveliness of the oil medium, as well as a set of self-imposed restrictions that relate to the action of painting and her sense of the works as performative gestures, indexed to the artist’s presence.

Her paintings reference an embodied self, reflected in the thickly textured, punctuated surfaces. In seeking to reinvigorate and advance the language of action painting, Yossifor concentrates the “action” near the center of each work while allowing it to become more diffuse around the edges, establishing a figure-ground relationship. A delicate balance between cognition and action—in which the resolution of pictorial space coexists in tension with the painting as a record of an event—the works are grounded in the artist’s movement and are generated by utilizing a process that resembles automatic drawing. Yossifor attacks, scores, and interacts with the paint to create textural lines and structures that echo drawings; these drawing features are subsequently buried in the ensuing layers of paint.

Liat Yossifor received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2002.

She was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg residency in Florida in 2020 and a guest of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany in 2010.

Select solo exhibitions include "Communicating Vessels," Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “Letters Apart,” PATRON, Chicago, IL; “No Second Chances in the Land of a Thousand Dances,” Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia; “So, a forgotten fire,” Páramo Gallery, Gallery Weekend, Mexico City, Mexico; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; “A Body of Water,” PATRON, Chicago, IL; “The Stand,” Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico; “Small Works,” Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY; “Double Life,” Anita Beckers Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany and “Time Turning Paint,” Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA.

Group exhibitions include “If You Can Dream It, You Can Build It,” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; “El Nopal: Selections, “ SPACE 1028, Los Angeles, CA; “A Time of Monsters,” Fort Gansevoort Gallery, New York, NY; “Sculptural Surfaces: Liat Yossifor and Pia Fries (curated by Ludwig Seyfarth),” Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany; “100 Years and Counting,” Minnesota Museum of Art, Saint Paul, MN; “B.A.T. State III: Women Artists in Conversation with El Nopal Press,” Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA; “Permafrost,” Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia and “WET WET WET: Erin Lawlor, Aida Tomescu and Liat Yossifor,” Fox Jensen McCrory, Auckland, New Zealand.

Select collections include Creative Artists Agency Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, Mexico City, Mexico; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, LA and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Liat Yossifor lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.