-
Liat Yossifor
Communicating Vessels
13 May - 19 June 2021
-
Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Liat Yossifor. Communicating Vessels will open 13 May at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 19 June 2021. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by the Paris-based scholar Susan L. Power.
-
-
LIAT YOSSIFOR
Portrait I, 2021
Oil on linen
80 x 60 inches
203.2 x 152.4 cm
"Reaching a crescendo with this latest body of work, Communicating Vessels, the artist demonstrates an assuredness and acute control concomitant to jubilant release. These exuberant expanses of paint reward sustained contemplation, inviting the viewer to experience the exchange and entanglement of complementary pairings—accretion and removal, motion and stillness, action and reflection, radiance and shadow, vigor and languor, agitation and serenity, give and take, back and forth."
- Susan Power, excerpt from “Communicating Vessels” -
"This body of work is about oppositions, and so the show is anchored by two large works, a black and a yellow, that are relational. One emits light and one absorbs it. I am aiming at a conversation between the works that operates along the concept of "Contemplating Vessels" to activate a communication between ideas across the space. I know it sounds elementary, that every painting is supposed to do that, but some works are more self invovled or let's say, they tell the full story in full on their own, and in this exhibition, it's about these lines of communication between two opposites."
- Liat Yossifor
-
View More
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.
