Liat Yossifor Israel, b. 1974

Liat Yossifor was born in 1974 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and moved to the United States in 1989. She received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1996 and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine, in 2002. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Among the residencies and fellowships she has held: the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship (2022); an artist residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva Island, Florida (2020); and the Deutsche Börse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2010).

Yossifor's paintings are built through a process of accumulation and erasure, applying thick oil paint in bold strokes, stabs, and smudges, then scraping, redoing, and revising within a single session. The result is a surface that is simultaneously painterly and sculptural, carrying the physical evidence of every decision and hesitation. Working within a deliberately restricted monochromatic palette, she explores the tension between figure and ground, between the impulse to depict and the refusal to resolve. Her early work engaged directly with the human figure, producing monochrome portraits of women posed as soldiers, in which features appear etched into dense fields of pigment. Over time, her practice has moved toward a more fully abstract register, though the body and its traces remain present as an organizing force. The work engages the history of American monochrome painting while remaining shaped by the artist's own experience of cultural displacement, the rupture of moving between languages, landscapes, and identities.

Yossifor's work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul; the Margulies Collection, Miami; the Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (CIAC), Mexico City; the Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest, Germany; the Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach; and the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, among others. An artist book, Movements: Liat Yossifor, with essays by Stella Rollig, Ed Schad, Karen Lang, and Christopher Michno, was published by DoppelHouse Press, Los Angeles, in 2016.

Yossifor's solo exhibition history spans institutions and galleries across the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Australasia. Key presentations include The Black Paintings at Noga Gallery of Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Project Series 32: The Tender Among Us at the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont (2007); Falling Into Ends at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt; Pre-Verbal Painting at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); Double Life at Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt (2016); A Body of Water at PATRON Gallery, Chicago (2016); Recent Paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2018); No Second Chances in the Land of a Thousand Dances at Fox Jensen, Sydney (2020); Letters Apart at PATRON Gallery, Chicago (2021); Communicating Vessels at Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2021); the gray feather a thrush lost at 68projects by KORNFELD, Berlin (2022); Life Against Itself at PATRON Gallery, Chicago (2023); and Braided Time at Fox Jensen McCrory, Auckland (2025). Group exhibitions have taken her work to the Kunsthaus Nuremberg; the Museum of Modern Fine Arts, Minsk; the Torrance Art Museum; the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London; the Margulies Collection, Miami; the Minnesota Museum of American Art; and the Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest, among many others. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, X-Tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Huffington Post.

Liat Yossifor's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin grew out of the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship, co-organized with 68projects by KORNFELD. In 2022, Yossifor came to Berlin as a fellow, and her residency culminated in the solo exhibition the gray feather a thrush lost at 68projects (April 28 to June 25, 2022), her first solo presentation in Berlin. In 2024, she was included in Berlin on My Mind: Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, the milestone group exhibition bringing together all twenty-one artists who have participated in the residency program since its founding.

Liat Yossifor's practice continues to deepen its engagement with the physical and psychological dimensions of painting, with each new body of work pressing further into the territory where gesture, time, and identity converge on the surface of the canvas.