Liat Yossifor – the gray feather a thrush lost
68projects is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based Israeli artist Liat Yossifor in Berlin. The exhibition will coincide with the artist's Berlin Fellowship at the renowned Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V.
“Discourse is alive outside of comfort zones. A new place can bring about new ideas, and working and showing abroad have always shifted my thinking, but especially now during a time when the world is shaken. My Berlin Fellowship with VATMH and 68projects is a setup to test new ideas in a new context, away from what I know, from my routines.
I will be working on a body of work entitled the gray feather a thrush lost (a line from Try to Praise the Mutilated Worldby Adam Zagajewski), which is about beauty and loss. My work is both painting and reflections on history, and I get there not necessarily through concepts, but by being present and dealing with current events through a daily practice of painting.”
— Liat Yossifor
68projects is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Berlin by Los Angeles–based Israeli artist Liat Yossifor. The exhibition coincides with the artist’s Berlin Fellowship at the renowned Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V.
The poem by Adam Zagajewski, from which the exhibition title is taken, consists of lines about normalcy and beauty that are interrupted by descriptions of brutality. Yossifor’s new paintings negotiate rough paint handling with lyrical line work as well as natural movements and their deviations. She achieves this by drawing and scoring into thick, textural masses of paint.
Dark grays dominate this newest series, which also showcases a thickness never before seen in her practice. The thicker the structure, the deeper the markings left within. For Yossifor, gray is not an aesthetic choice but rather the outcome of complementary colors cancelling one another through the intensive process of gestural painting. For viewers, whatever color and gesture are lost through this process are what we, in turn, can gain—by allowing ourselves to consider our own markings in life and moments of erasure.
Liat Yossifor was born in Israel in 1974 and has been living in the United States since 1989. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. In her work, she explores the effects of cultural change and identity ruptures. Using a monochromatic palette, Yossifor’s gestural brushstrokes explore the tension between figure and ground, action and stillness, sign and symbol. Her paintings are not pictorial, but more physical—almost sculptural.
Solo exhibitions (selection):
Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MI); Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA); Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (Claremont, CA); Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt/Main, Germany); Patron Gallery (Chicago, IL).
Group exhibitions (selection):
Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN); Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum (Long Beach, CA); Museo de Arte de Sinaloa (Culiacán, Mexico); Museo de Arte de Zapopan (Mexico); Museum of Modern Fine Arts (Minsk, Belarus); Margulies Collection (Miami, FL); Kunsthaus Nürnberg (Nuremberg, Germany); Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London, CT).
Collections (selection):
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (Mexico City); Minnesota Museum of American Art; The Margulies Collection (Miami).
