Lita Albuquerque

Project Space

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.

Lita Albuquerque was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia and Paris. At the age of eleven she settled with her family in the U.S. In the 1970s Albuquerque emerged on the California art scene as part of the Light and Space movement and won acclaim for her epic and poetic ephemeral pigment paintings pertaining to mapping, identity and the cosmos. Her site-specific artworks have spanned the globe including: the Great Pyramids of Giza, Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the Arctic Circle, the Saudi Arabian and Mojave deserts and the Washington Monument. She was winner of the sixth International Cairo Biennale Prize (1996) and a National Science Foundation award for Stellar Axis (2006-2007). Additional honors include: an Arts International award for U.S. artist representative for the Cairo Biennale; three National Endowment for the Arts: Art in Public Places Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Perugia, Italy. Her performance works were presented at: Desert X, Laguna Museum of Art, Mount Wilson Observatory, and the Getty’s Museum Pacific Standard Time Festival. Exhibitions include: Hirschhorn Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Orange County Museum of Art, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, a career survey at Santa Monica Museum of Art and most recently Light and Space, Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, and Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022. She is featured in numerous public and private collections internationally, including: the Getty Trust, LACMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY and LA, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, Whitney Museum of Art, the archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and her Stellar Axis archive is held in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Albuquerque is represented by Kohn Gallery and Peter Blake Gallery.