Liz Larner: As Stars and Seas Entwine at Regen Projects, Los Angeles
24 Mar to 22 May 2021
All Images courtesy of Regen Projects
“Plastics…were used in furniture, clothing, containers, appliances, just about
everything. Sometimes the poisons leached into food or water and caused
cancer, and sometimes there was a fire and plastics burned and gassed people to
death…. The only place that has enough of it to be a real danger is right here.”
— Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites, 1988
Regen Projects is pleased to present As Stars and Seas Entwine, the eighth solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Liz Larner, whose deep research-based practice is united by a continual exploration of form, material, and color. This exhibition will debut one of the new large-scale floor sculptures and a number of ceramic works that will be included in Below Above, a forthcoming museum exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich in the summer of 2022.
The works on view reveal Larner’s acceptance of Posthumanist thought that the Anthropocene induces as the world becomes beleaguered by rapidly depleting resources and the massive waste that accompanies our extractive industries. Meerschaum Drift, 2020–2021, a large, low floor sculpture constructed of plastic refuse Larner collected over the course of three years, seems to billow and surge through the space like seafoam. Serving as a meditation on the pervasive and exponential presence of plastic in the world, the sculpture is at once beautiful and horrible, a complex combination that evokes the pathos of its material. This Meerschaum Drift’s materiality belies its intricate form and supposes a transformation of crude material into an art object. Plastic-derived acrylic paint applied to its surface gives the sculpture the overall sense of movement in color from deep blue to green to white, evoking the ephemeral quality of sea foam for which it is named.
As hinted to in the exhibition’s title, a new series of Asteroid works conjunct the same space as the Meerschaum Drift. These free-form ceramics embody the terrestrial material of their making while illuminating celestial qualities of asteroids, apparent in their form and unearthly looking glazed surfaces. The works stand for the many known and unknown bodies moving in space which contain the real possibility of violent collision, even as their presence and number in our solar system are always being discovered. Investigating the diffractive relation between human experience, cultural forms, material ecologies, and the natural world, Larner’s Asteroids embody a small piece of the heavens as art and ask us to consider our connection to that which is known but is not always seen.
Liz Larner (b. 1960) received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1985. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Larner’s work will be the subject of a solo museum exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York in January 2022 and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in April of 2022. A solo presentation of her work will be held at Kunsthalle Zurich in summer 2022. Previous solo and two-person museum exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2016); Art Institute of Chicago (2015); Two or Three or Something: Maria Lassnig, Liz Larner, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001); I Thought I Saw a Pussycat, MAK—Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (1998); and Kunsthalle Basel (1997).
Group exhibitions featuring Larner’s work include New Time: Contemporary Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, opening in fall 2021 at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Seven Stations: Selections from MOCA’s Collection, currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Foundation of the Museum: MOCA’s Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); Damage Control, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2013); Blues for Smoke, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); Under Destruction, Museum Tinguely, Basel (2010); the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society (2006); and Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1992). She was featured in two Whitney Biennials (2006, 1989).
She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Mutina This Is Not a Prize (2018); the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant (2014); Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2002); Anonymous Was a Woman (2000); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1999).
Work by the artist is held in prominent international collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas, Austin; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MAK—Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Regen Projects is open by appointment only. Make a reservation to visit the exhibition here.
For all press inquiries, please contact Ben Thornborough at +1 310 276 5424 or benthornborough@regenprojects.com.
For all other inquiries, please contact Sarvia Jasso, Katy McKinnon, or Irina Stark at Regen Projects.
