Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture by Liz Craft. This will be the artist’s second solo show in New York.
Working in aluminum, Craft has created five large-scale monumental cubes that bear wall friezes, reliefs, cut outs and outsized protruding limbs. For this show, Craft takes on the reverential and sculpture’s potential to be monumental, with large-scale and architectonic sculptures as her inspiration. While these new works are on one level clean minimalist boxes, Craft also continues to mine her particular iconography which draws from hippie, biker, and New Age-y California countercultures. Within each cube and frieze are interiors containing grotto-like inner lives. Using cast commonplace window frames in case, the openings allow the viewer to see the tableaus within. Each interior feels like aggrandized fragments of personal experiences, culled from both quotidian life and dreamlike memory. One contains a cave of stalactites, others are populated with Godzilla, palm trees, cushions, blooming vases, mermaid-like and floating figures. All are finished in a pristine white patina. The arm-like forms that extend from the sculptures feel almost Grecian in their design, yet also infuse the objects with an anthropomorphic strangeness. Typical of Craft’s work, the material solidity of the sculptures marks a contrast with the fanciful irreverence of the depicted figures and forms. Though the sculptures attain a new dimension in scale, they manage to retain a quaintness redolent of Craft’s previous works as the artist’s handicraft combines with refined craftsmanship.
Liz Craft lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and in the exhibition “Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists” at the Hammer Museum in 2007. Craft recently had her first monograph published with an introduction and interview by Betina Steinbrügge, and essays by Bruce Hainley and Heike Munder (pub. JRP Ringier/Halle fur Kunst).