Liz Larner
1960–
In explorations of what she calls “basic sculptural ideas,” Liz Larner makes works from a range of connotative materials: mirrors, living trees, aluminum, rope, false eyelashes, surgical gauze, ceramic, plexiglass, and leather, arranging them in large-scale, frequently colorful, abstract compositions of grids, solid forms, tangles, chains, and weavings. On the one hand, Larner’s mature body of work, begun in the late 1980s, accedes to the traditional modernist attitude that sculpture’s proper domain is space; on the other hand, Larner refuses historical protocols of formal purity.
Take the wobbly, uncanny shape of Two or Three or Something: twelve approximately equal sections of steel rod, each wrapped in paper washed with yellow watercolor, would form the edges of a cube were they straightened out and set at perpendicular angles, yet the sculpture, poised unstably on the ground on three corners, appears to have shimmied itself out of the confines of that ideal geometry. It also manages to establish volume without mass or density, existing on the pressure point between presence and absence, or between the implied space it demarcates and the larger space in which it exists and which is shared by the viewer. The mixed-media work evokes drawing through its linearity and the artist’s use of paper, while the bright watercolor suggests the painting tradition. It challenges the requirement that artwork occupy either two or three dimensions. The viewer’s movement around the piece maps a terrain of perception in which boundaries are permeable and implied volumes shift, and thus delivers the “something” named in its title.
Introduction
Liz Larner (born 1960) is an American installation artist and sculptor living and working in Los Angeles.
Wikidata identifier
Q16193702
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Accessed November 19, 2024.
Introduction
Larner explores notions of process, duration, and the relationship between technology and nature with her sculptures that incorporate germs, glass beakers, and petri dishes.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, sculptor
ULAN identifier
500118780
Names
Liz Larner
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed November 19, 2024.
