Lehmann Maupin announces Woven, a presentation of new and archival work by Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou. This In Focus exhibition highlights paintings and drawings that foreground Lou’s decades-long investigation into process, labor, and the essence and poetic possibility of glass beads. Woven precedes the artist’s forthcoming solo exhibition in New York, opening this September, in which Lou will debut a new body of work spanning the entirety of the gallery’s 24th Street location.

Forging an original, Feminist-inflected vision from the very beginning of her career, Lou has consistently challenged and expanded the boundary between the fine and applied arts. She has created figurative, room-sized installations, brightly chromatic sculptures, and mesmerizing minimal canvases, all of which render labor radically visible on both formal and conceptual registers. Over the past fifteen years, the artist has turned her focus to abstraction and repetitive processes to engage with art history while exploring the conceptual and metaphoric potential of certain abiding dualities, from presence and absence to cohesion and disintegration. Each of the works in Woven highlight Lou’s engagement with repetition and focus, as well as her deep understanding of materiality. In particular, her paintings and drawings use pen and graphite to “weave” cloth-like structures on a flat canvas—investigating the possibility of the two-dimensional format for making visible the thought process within repetitive labor.