Lita Albuqerque: Earth Skin
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.
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) 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, the 2019 Laguna Art Museum Wendt Artist of the Year Award, and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.
Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland; Desert X 2017; 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art; The Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.
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. A dedicated educator, Albuquerque has held many teaching appointments during her tenure, and was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.