Art Basel Unlimited

As part of the fair’s Unlimited sector, Lehmann Maupin will present Liza Lou’s landmark installation work Security Fence (2005). Crafted entirely from glass beads on steel and razor wire, Lou’s to-scale installation reconstructs exterior prison security measures—a chain link fence with barbed wire on top. Calling notions of security and fragility into question, Lou’s elaborate handmade work introduces touch and contact into a space of isolation, lending care and dignity to an otherwise dehumanizing and industrial structure.

Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou makes sculpture, paintings, drawings and room-size environments that reflect upon issues of women’s labor and connotations of the sublime. While decoration plays an important part in her practice, Lou creates painstaking work that requires countless hours of artisanal-like expertise. Security Fence (2005), signals a point of connection between glamour and socio-political and cultural inequalities.

Liza Lou (b. 1969 NYC lives and works in Joshua Tree, California) is widely known for her pioneering work as both an artist and for her groundbreaking social practice of the mid-2000s. Beginning with her conceptual use of glass beads, Lou’s room-size installations of the 1990s challenged stereotypes and gender roles within the art canon and broke down boundaries between art and craft.¹ In 2002, she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, which she utilized to found a women’s advocacy program within her studio in Durban, South Africa which she operated from 2005-20, expanding the possibilities of social engagement within an art studio environment. During the 15 years she lived and worked in South Africa, Lou developed a poetic, handmade approach to Minimalism that utilizes the oils of the human hand as a form of paint in woven paintings, such as Soil | Solid (2012), which is in the permanent collection of the Des Moines Art Center, and room-scaled wall works, sculptures and installations, such as Security Fence (2005), now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Continuous Mile (2008), in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Current work has the artist in further dialogue with art history as she explores the possibility of her chosen material to act as a fluid paint body, bringing an original and Feminist vision to painting.² Through the slow accrual of a humble material, Lou recalibrates the action of a brushstroke into elaborate, cell-by-cell explorations that combines the exuberance of Pop and Abstract Expressionism with the materiality and sheen of her early work, while pushing the language of painting further forward.