Liza Lou Unbroken, 2022

There is lifeblood in process, in labor - the juice, the sweat and tears - all of it is in the making. — Liza Lou

Created in 2022, Unbroken belongs to Liza Lou's body of Cloud works, composed of square swatches of beads painted in soft pastel hues. Each square is scaled to the size of a standard dishcloth, and the beads are hammered away to reveal the intricate net of threads holding them together. The Cloud works gesture to Lou's enduring interest in gendered forms of labour, as expressed in the domestic setting of her early installation Kitchen (1996), for which she replicated the titular room in multi-coloured beads. Charting a move from the representational to the abstract, the Cloud works mark a significant development in the artist's practice as she draws on feminist discourses of Modernist abstraction. Building upon her earlier series of white beaded squares incorporated in the body of work titled The Waves, she takes inspiration from Agnes Martin's grid paintings and Jo Baer's white canvases bordered by black and yellow lines. The evocative titles of the Cloud works, exemplified by Unbroken, introduce a narrative element to the abstract works and, in tandem with the disturbed surfaces of the painted glass beads, are expressive of complex emotional states.

i see you, a solo exhibition of work by Liza Lou, is currently on view at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais until 3 June 2023.