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Liza Lou
(American, b.1969)
Woven
Sheet: 28 x 22 inches (71.12 x 56 cm)
Price on request
Lithograph printed in Handschy Proofing Black ink, a fine, fresh impression of the only state, the full sheet, printed on 140lb High White Arches watercolor paper, with margins, hand-signed, titled and numbered in pencil by the artist, executed in an edition of only 28 examples (there were also 3 numbered Artists Proofs, 3 numbered Hors Commerce proofs, 2 numbered Printers Proofs, 1 Center for Contemporary Printmaking proof (CCP), 1 annotated Bon à tirer proof and 8 unique and annotated Color Trial Proofs), printed by Deb Chaney at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk and Deb Chaney Editions, Brooklyn, published by World House Editions, Middlebury, Connecticut, in very fine condition, unframed.
Exhibited:
Waterbury, Connecticut, Mattatuck Museum, Work It! Women Artists on Womens Labor, 03 September – 31 December 2022 (the museum’s example).
New York, International Print Center New York, Idols and Impossible Structures: New Prints 2017/Winter, 19 January – 01 April 2017 (another example).
Literature:
Hanley, Sarah Kirk. “Edition Reviews A-Z: Liza Lou,” article in Art in Print, Volume 6, Number 6, March-April 2017, pp.14-15, illustrated (this example).
Roznoy, Cynthia. “Liza Lou, Deb Chaney and Woven,” article in Journal of the Print World, Volume I, Number 1, January 2017, p.16, illustrated (another example).
Collections:
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts (promised gift)
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, Connecticut
Note:
Liza Lou is best known for her pioneering use of glass beads in contemporary art, using them to create paintings, sculptures, objects and room-size installations. The artist has been producing works of art that utilize glass beads and repetitive processes to explore broader metaphorical ideas and possibilities for the past 35 years. Her work and practice break down traditional hierarchies between fine art and craft by blending the materials of sculpture, textiles, painting and jewelry making. Labor and the processes of making, particularly the meticulous techniques involved in the handmade, are central to her work. In the 1990s Lou worked on her own, and in 1998 she began to enlist the community and studio assistants for large-scale works. From 2005 to 2020 the artist divided her time between Los Angeles and Durban, South Africa. In Durban, she established an art studio and a women’s advocacy program, the first of its kind to combine social practice within an art studio setting.
For Woven, Liza Lou commissioned a cloth to be woven out of silver beads in Durban, South Africa. Once the cloth was in her Los Angeles studio, the artist laid a sheet of heavy Mylar over the weaving and then traced over every bead using a needle-thin drafting pen. She has said of the process, “In tracing the weaving, I circled the perfection and imperfection of every anonymous stitch. The incongruity and the wobble of my hand became part of it, too, holding hands across the miles.”
The image size of this work is 12 x 10 inches (30.48 x 25.4 cm).