Liz Larner, Blorange and Yew encircle below – detail, 2023 (30,5 x 24,1 x 108 cm)
Liz Larner
b. 1960, Sacramento, CA, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Liz Larner’s practice in abstraction developed from an early interest in found object assemblage and photography. An important early series by Larner involved her adding traces of eclectic substances – buttermilk, salmon eggs, a penny, a cough – to petri dishes of agar jelly, and allowing the bacteria from those things to bloom over the course of the exhibition. She called these works “Cultures,” taking photographs of them and later exhibiting them as living sculptures.
What has become central to Larner’s work is the role of her materials in writing their own stories. Since the 1990s, she has worked with fired and glazed clay (as well as bronze, steel, stone, glass and found plastic, among other media) which, in Larner’s hands, becomes a uniquely absorptive and reflective material, not unlike agar jelly. In particular, Larner’s wall-mounted ceramic slabs create new space between painting and sculpture, between image and surface.
Installation view, Liz Larner: below above, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, 2022
Images Courtesy of Kunsthalle Zürich and the artist, photos by Annik Wetter
Images Courtesy of Kunsthalle Zürich and the artist, photos by Annik Wetter
Larner has studied natural processes and formations such as fungi, lichens or coral reefs; she appreciates how such objects (not really singular objects at all but rather networks of organisms) are created autonomously without an intentional scheme, or a singular purpose. Instead, they support numerous living beings, and depend on numerous others. As with Larner’s sculptures, they express a certain inherent material intelligence, a will of a material to go in a certain direction, to produce a particular form.
Installation view, Liz Larner: below above, Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland, 2022
Images Courtesy of Kunsthalle Zürich and the artist, photos by Annik WetterLarner earned her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985 and has since exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Her work has been featured in major institutions such as Kunsthaus Graz in Austria, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland. She was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s at MOCA Los Angeles.
Recognized for her contributions to contemporary art, Larner received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999 and the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2002. Her work is held in prestigious collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She continues to live and work in Los Angeles, pushing the limits of materiality and space.