n the blue, even expanse above
Los Angeles, clouds are rare – yet they have
been a recent preoccupation for local artist
Liza Lou. ‘If you’re someone who watches
clouds, they happen here more often than
you think,’ she says. They are the subject of
her new solo exhibition, ‘The Classification
and Nomenclature of Clouds’, inaugurating
Lehmann Maupin’s second New York
gallery on 6 September. The main event is
The Clouds, 2015-18, a painting that, like
Les Nuages from Monet’s Water Lilies series,
is a monumental triptych that immerses
the viewer in delicate tufts of colour.
Outside her studios in both Topanga
Canyon and Durban, South Africa, Lou does
as the Impressionists did: she paints clouds
en plein air. But rather than using canvas,
she paints on a grid of minuscule glass beads,
threaded by hand by Zulu artisans based in
South Africa. She dilutes her oil paints and
layers them on in washes, or rubs them into
the beads and wipes them away. Other times,
she’ll apply thick swathes of impasto to the
grids of beads, which retain the shape of
the stroke of her knife. When the painted
grids are dry, she takes a hammer to them,
chiselling away at the beads and exposing
the matrix of threads holding them together.Kitchen took Lou five years and a few pairs
of tweezers to complete. She estimates
that each of the 600, 35cm square panels of
beads that make up The Clouds would have
taken her two weeks to produce. But Lou
no longer works alone. In 2005, seeking to
employ women with a greater mastery of
beadwork, she travelled to South Africa,
where Zulu women are renowned for their
beading tradition. She hired an initial team
of 12 to help her complete Security Fence,
2005, a razor-wire, chain-link enclosure
with a crystalline sparkle.
Having imagined she would leave after
three months, Lou stayed in Durban for
ten years. Living in South Africa triggered
profound shifts in her practice, most visibly
a move towards abstraction. Her Ixube series,
from the Zulu word for ‘random’ or ‘mixture’,
was a minimalist’s colour field. Treating her
jars of coloured beads like paint, she would
mix up varying hues, and disseminate batches
among her team to be threaded. The resulting
strips of colour made by many different hands
were then woven into a single composition.
Many of her team worked from home, so they
could care for children; they would return
their strips with the imprints of hands or
smudges of dirt. These became so integral »LEFT AND BELOW, ON
A STONE AT HER STUDIO,
LOU HAMMERS A GRID
OF BEADS, EXPOSING
THE THREADS THAT
JOIN THEM TO CREATE
TRANSPARENCY AND
DEPTH. MULTIPLE
PANELS MAY BE PUT
TOGETHER TO FORM
LARGER ARTWORKSIt’s a way of adding depth and transparency,
‘a way of carving into a painting’, says Lou.
Her body of work touches on the
pointillism of Georges Seurat, pop art and
geometric minimalism. At the heart of
it all are the tiny glass beads, where the
distinctions between painting and sculpture
begin to blur. In arguably her most famous
work, Kitchen, 1991-96, she covered a life-size
kitchen with beads, down to the minutest
details: the crinkles on the surface of a
slouching potato chip bag, the water flowing
from the tap. The transparency and reflection
of millions of pieces of coloured glass created
something of a luminous, three-dimensional
Impressionist painting. Kitchen questioned the
ideas of ‘women’s work’ just as the studded
material challenged the distinction between
‘serious’ male art and women’s arts and crafts.
Lou was confronted with that prejudice
early in her career. During her first days at
the San Francisco Art Institute, she stumbled
into a bead store and incorporated them
into her paintings, a tactic wholeheartedly
dismissed by her tutors. ‘It was decorative.
It was too feminist,’ she recalls. After
two months, she dropped out and began
a career-long meditation on the division
of sex and labour.I
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Art