Lita Albuquerque, Earth Skin

September 12 - October 19, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce Earth Skin, an exhibition of new works by renowned artist Lita Albuquerque. For her fourth exhibition with the gallery, Albuquerque will present a new installation and series of paintings as part of The Getty’s 2024 Pacific Standard Time initiative. Known for her transformative artistic engagements in remote sites, Albuquerque’s work has historically blended the earthly with the cosmic. The exhibition will be on view from September 12 through October 19, 2024.
 
Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.
 
Thinking about the exhibition, Albuquerque writes: 
Feet dancing above the earth, dancing with fervor, drumming, the increasing drumming of the feet not fragile on the fragile earth.

The wisps of bodies, like skins falling off their frames leaving the planet, the planet strong and our forms ethereal, the strength of us, our feet, on the fragile earth, the wispy lightness of us, detached from the earth, transforming into space.
 
The earth strong behind us, propelling us upward, giving us her strength, throwing us in the air, while we fly, never falling, the fierce intensity of our rhythm while alive, and the freedom of release from the earth.
  
Experiments of intensities of emotions and colors, whirling dervishes’ cyclones, Earth Skin is whispered, “Earth Skin” she whispered.
 
For PST’s Art and Science Collide, Albuquerque transforms the gallery with a titular installation, Earth Skin. A membrane of decomposed granite fills the space creating the illusory sensation of the earth being revealed below the gallery, as if the concrete floor has been meticulously removed. Accompanying this installation is a new series of paintings revolving around the gestures of the body and ancient marks, like a hieroglyphic code only the artist has a key for. With each gesture, Albuquerque embraces the tactile intimacy of painting, reminding us of the power of capturing and transforming the elusive into the material. This installation invites viewers to explore the shared fragility of humanity and earth.

Michael Kohn Gallery is a part of PST ART as a Gallery Program Participant. Returning in September 2024 with its latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this landmark regional event explores the intersections of art and science both past and present. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.

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Lita Albuquerque, Project Space

September 24 - October 29, 2022
Gallery 2

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.

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Lita Albuquerque, Liquid Light

Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a special event celebrating the exhibition of Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light, an official Collateral Event of La Biennale di Venezia 2022. 

On June 25, the gallery will host a double screening of Liquid Light, the central film in the multi-screen exhibition and installation of the same name, currently on view as a Collateral Event of La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022. As part of the night’s program, the artist will give an introduction and insight on the exhibition presented at La Biennale di Venezia. Albuquerque is joined by Nicole McDonald, the editor of Liquid Light and one of Albuquerque’s collaborators, and Elizabeta Betinski, curator for Liquid Light at the Biennale and director of bardoLA. The night will feature two screenings, the first at 5:00 pm followed by the final screening at 7:00 pm. The artist has produced a limited edition print that will be on view in Gallery 3 during the evening’s festivities. A celebratory reception for the artist is set to take place in between screenings. 

Liquid Light is the second film in a trilogy surrounding a story created by Albuquerque about a 25th-century female astronaut who descends to planet Earth to spread interstellar consciousness. In the 27-minute narrative film, the female astronaut transmits an otherworldly knowledge across the planes of the celestial and terrestrial. Hers is a subjectivity constituted in the space between the outer reaches of the imagination and the emotionally submerged land she discovers on Earth. Mirroring the threshold state in which humanity finds itself today, Albuquerque’s heroine is likewise caught between light and darkness, unable to avoid a metamorphosis triggered by her initial failure to communicate the poetics of Cosmic harmony to Earth’s inhabitants.

Conceived and directed by Lita Albuquerque, filmed in Bolivia by David McFarland, and performed by dancer Jasmine Albuquerque, the film takes us to the Salar de Uyuni, the largest and highest salt flats in the world, as well as Lake Titicaca, home of many ancient myths surrounding gold and light.

Film Credits:

Choreography and dance by Jasmine Albuquerque

Cinematography by David McFarland

Editing by Nicole McDonald

Costumes by Jillian Oliver

Co-produced by Briana Gonzales

Co-produced and drone footage by Marc Breslin

Artist Page

Lita Albuquerque, Embodiment

January 9 - February 27, 2016
Gallery 1

What is that color at the Particle Horizon, at the furthest point that we can see? Between Heaven and Earth? …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

Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Lita Albuquerque – composed of new pigment paintings and sculpture installations, Embodiment continues her investigations into space, color, materiality and the body. For decades, Albuquerque has been working in remote locations and deserts as sites to execute artworks that mark time and space, and in so doing our relationship to light, matter and one another. Often working with materials as raw and essential as her subject matter, Albuquerque’s work, whether on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the Pyramids at Giza, or taking her graduate students to the ancient Mayan temples and sacred cenotes, elucidates an intense participatory experience.

In response to research on pigments and an obsession with the vibratory quality of color on the perceptual system and the body, Albuquerque’s choice of color for the exhibition embarks upon a new horizon for the artist. Subtle variations of rose madder (taken from lake roots), soft purple vesuvianite (originally found on Mt. Vesuvius) and pigments used in centuries-old Japanese painting technique called Enogu form the main gallery’s palette. Executed on layers of black and white pigment backgrounds, the paintings’ top layers of colorful pigment begin to vibrate and form a tonal language. Light is at once absorbed, reflected and refracted – perhaps metaphors for light as consciousness. And if we can consider light equivalent to consciousness, than these paintings highlight our collective awareness so that perception is made possible. It is no surprise that Albuquerque’s choice of pigment takes us from lake waters to volcanoes, from the roots of plants to the roots of the earth’s core, materials that are at once below and above the earth’s surface.

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Lita Albuquerque, Light Carries Information

November 15 - December 20, 2014
Gallery 2

Kohn Gallery is pleased to present a focused exhibition of 4 new photographic works by internationally acclaimed artist Lita Albuquerque. These new works were carefully selected from a series of photographs taken of Albuquerque’s 2006 Land Art installation on Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. 

With the help of NSF astronomer Simon Balm, Albuquerque created a star map of the ninety-nine brightest stars and their constellations visible at the South Pole during the four-week stay, creating a reverse sky onto the ice. She deployed ninety-nine ultramarine blue fiberglass spheres of varying diameters positioned on the ice, from ten inches to four feet, to represent the relative magnitude of the stars. The project imaginatively links the stars through both poles as a shaft of light aligned with the rotational axis of the Earth, creating a double helix that is a metaphor for the conveyance of information—a kind of stellar DNA.

Stellar Axis was the first large-scale artwork created in Antarctica. Considered a milestone of contemporary Land Art, the installation was regarded as both a stunning and ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent. The project received international acclaim. A full exhibition of the photographs, film, objects and archive materials related to this project are on view at the Nevada Museum of Art until January 4th 2015 and the USC Fisher Museum of Art will host Albuquerque in 2016 for an exhibition featuring performance, film, writing and photographs relating to the project.

Published in conjunction with this exhibition, Lita Albuquerque: Stellar Axis is the first major publication on this important and renowned artist. The 224-page hardcover book contains color photographs by Jean de Pomereu and text by Albuquerque, Nevada Museum of Art Director David B. Walker, Center for Art + Environment Director William L. Fox, Nevada Museum of Art Senior Curator/Deputy Director Ann M. Wolfe, Astrophysicist Roger F. Malina and USC Fisher Museum of Art Director Selma Holo. This book will be sold during the opening and book signing on Saturday, November 15th, beginning at 6pm.

The film Stellar Axis: Antarctica will play throughout the opening. The roughly 8 minute film, shot by Lionel Cousin and directed by Jon Beasley, acts as a visual vehicle that transports the viewer to Antarctica and situates Albuquerque’s artwork in this mysterious landscape. Accompanied by an original score by Beasley, the film captures the essence of this important artwork that is at once haunting and solemn.

Lita Albuquerque is now represented by the Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. Albuquerque is an internationally renowned artist who, over the course of her 40-year career, developed a strong visual language and an expansive body of work ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting, photography, film, and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. She is on the core faculty of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design.

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