Drawing on ancient symbologies of the continuous cycles of death and rebirth, beginnings and endings, transitions and passageways, Life Against Itself is grounded in a series of new large-scale paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Liat Yossifor. The exhibition extends her trajectory of rich, textural oil paintings in which thick layers of impasto are built up to all but conceal glimmers of colored surfaces below. Geological in their weight and depth, Yossifor’s bodily forms hold motifs and figurative suggestions which appear and disappear through the paintings.
LIAT YOSSIFOR (b. 1974 Tel Aviv, Israel) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the University of California in Irvine, CA and a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA.
In 2023 Yossifor’s work will be presented in solo exhibitions at La Verne University’s Harris Art Gallery (accompanied by a publication of ekphrastic poems by Ed Schad) (April 2023) and Liat Yossifor with Hans Kaiser, The Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest, Germany (accompanied by a publication edited by Ludwig Seyfarth (September 2023). Additional select solo exhibitions include: Pre-Verbal Painting, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO (2015); Expanding on an expansive subject, The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA (2015); Time Turning Paint, Nichols Gallery, Broad Center, Pitzer College, Claremont, CA (2016); The Tender Among Us, Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2007); Double Life, Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); Communicating Vessels, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY (2021); Letters Apart, PATRON Gallery, Chicago (2021); No Second Chances in the Land of a Thousand Dances, Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2020); and the gray feather a thrush lost, a VATMH fellow at 68 Projects, Berlin, Germany. (2022).
Group exhibitions include: Modulaciones, Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico and at the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico (2018); B.A.T. State III: Women Artists in Conversation with El Nopal Press, Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA (2019); 100 Years and Counting, Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN (2019); Stolen Gestures, Kunsthaus Nurnberg, Germany (2013); New Works, The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL (2015).
Yossifor was the recipient of Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship (2022) and was a guest of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany (2010). She was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg residency in Captiva Island, Florida (2020). Select public collections include: Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (CIAC), Mexico City, Mexico; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
