Lita Albuquerque
What is that color at the Particle Horizon, at the furthest point that we can see? Between Heaven and Earth? And what is that color that embodies my being? I think of my body in relationship to the Earth’s surface and of the planet in relation to the cosmos. What I am interested in starts with the surface of the earth, a horizontal surface, something flat to inscribe on. So I started by pouring pigments on the earth, and from that to a sculptural space, the earth as a sculpture moving in space.
– Lita Albuquerque
Selected Works
Project Space
September 24 - October 29, 2022
Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a special display of works by Lita Albuquerque, housed in the Project Space. The artist has recently experienced an increased emergence on the international exhibition circuit, including major installations for Desert X AlUla and Copenhagen Contemporary, and most notably a solo exhibition, Liquid Light, on view through November 27th as part of the 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022, and curated by Elizabeta Betinski of bardoLA and Neville Wakefield. Albuquerque’s body of work interweaves photography, film, performance, painting, and sculpture into a vibrant synthesis of personal and cosmic mythologies through the central tenet “light carries information”.
At Kohn Gallery, Albuquerque has organized a selection of works centered around her use of pigment pertaining to the experience of light reflecting materials in nature like salt and snow. The display includes a painting from Albuquerque’s Auric Field series, rock sculptures dusted with white pigments, and a small figurative sculpture which relates to the narrative in the Liquid Light film. For the reception, Albuquerque will have a one time screening of Liquid Light at Kohn Gallery at 5pm, September 24, 2022. The works at Kohn Gallery utilize white color pigments to build a contemplative space referencing the color’s reflective qualities in nature.
Albuquerque famously installed Stellar Axis: Antarctica, a land artwork of 99 ultramarine blue spheres on the Antarctic ice, in 2006. There, the artist encountered and embraced a light of deep clarity where one could see infinitely beyond the landscape’s horizon. Albuquerque recalls this experience during the filming for the Liquid Light exhibition at the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia. The display at Kohn Gallery’s Project Space correlates and emphasizes the encounter with the phenomena of luminosity in nature.
Albuquerque work’s often relies on elements and materials - pigment, gold, rocks - that become poetic when used as mediums to conceptual link the human to the cosmos. They exemplify the artist’s innovative interdisciplinary approach to an art practice that pertains to the cosmos.
Past Exhibitions
Selected Press
About the Artist
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal.
She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.
Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. Albuquerque continues her investigations into identity and the cosmos with upcoming ephemeral projects planned at Mount Vesuvius in Naples, Italy, the 2nd installment of her project Stellar Axis off the coast of Greenland, and at the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. She is on the core faculty of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design.