Movements: Liat Yossifor
Liat Yossifor’s first artist monograph focuses on a series of ever-evolving grey paintings she produced from 2011-2016.
Employing a time-based process to create these works, she continuously scrapes, sculpts, and re-works the paint until it hardens on the surface. Of the works here, Yossifor has said, “The grey is so much more for me. The grey is the result of color being consumed, of constant editing. The grey is the result of a thousand paintings that got destroyed in the process of making a single one.” Yossifor was profiled by Modern Painters as an artist to watch in 2016 and has recently had exhibitions in New York; Frankfurt, Germany; Guadalajara and Chicago. The book includes essays by Karen Lang, Christopher Michno, Stella Rollig and Ed Schad and was designed by award-winning Vienna-based graphic artist Peter Duniecki.
My interest in the paintings of Liat Yossifor is multifold. [...] In her work, she has opened up a distinct space for herself within a domain many thought was no longer possible to work in: drawing in paint on canvas. In her work, Yossifor rejects the formal claim that drawing in paint (as in Willem de Kooning) evolved into the non-expressionistic use of paint-as-paint (Jackson Pollock). Rather than embracing this view of materiality, she seems to be interested in the connotative possibilities of paint’s materiality when it is explored through alla prima painting and a rethinking of the figure-ground relationship. Her works suggest figural abstractions in which no figure is visible.
— John Yau, Hyperallergic, May 29, 2021
Liat Yossifor is an Israeli-born artist based in Los Angeles. She has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including (solos) The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; The Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA; and Pitzer Art Galleries in Claremont. Group exhibitions include those at the Museo de Arte de Sinaloa, Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico; the Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico; Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA; the University of La Verne, La Verne, CA; the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT; Kunsthaus Nuremberg, Germany; and the Margulies Collection.
Yossifor earned her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, 2002. She completed residencies at The Rauschenberg in Captiva Island in Florida in 2020, and at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany in 2010. Select public collections include: Creative Artist Agency (CAA), Los Angeles, CA; 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.
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